Oppo’s year-on-year smartphone shipments declined 19.6% in January-March in India, according to IDC.
Chinese consumer electronics maker Oppo has announced to shut down its chip design unit blaming the weak global economy and the smartphone industry. According to a TechCrunch report, the BBK Electronics-owned company said to cease operations of its Zeku unit.
“Due to the uncertainties in the global economy and the smartphone industry, we have to make difficult adjustments for long-term development. Therefore, the company has decided to cease the operation of Zeku,” Oppo said in a statement. Zeku’s products include the MariSilicon X chip, a neural processing unit designed to improve images for video and photography taken on smartphones via machine learning.
While Oppo managed to finish the first quarter of 2023 as India’s third-largest smartphone vendor with a market share of 17.6%, IDC reported that the Chinese company’s year-on-year smartphone shipments declined 19.6% in January-March in the country. Oppo’s other Chinese rivals Xiaomi and Realme also reported a decline in smartphone shipments in India in the previous quarter. Xiaomi’s shipments declined by 41.1% with a market share of 16.4% and Realme recorded the highest shipment decline of 52.2% in India in Q1 2023 with a market share of 9.4%.
Overall smartphone shipments in India declined by 16% year-on-year in the January-March quarter, IDC noted. On the other hand, the total global smartphone shipments in the first quarter dropped 13% year-on-year to 269.8 million units, another report by Canalys pointed out.
Meanwhile, the TechCrunch report also highlighted that Zeku’s abrupt ending comes as a surprise as Zeku was still hiring for various posts just a month ago. Also, the move is coming at a time when Oppo and its rival Xiaomi were seen as bolstering their in-house chip development in pursuit of self-reliance as geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. are rising.
Back in 2019, American officials placed China’s Huawei on a trade blacklist, restricting most of the country’s suppliers from shipping goods and technology to the company without licenses. The move was to cut off the company’s ability to buy or design the semiconductor chips that power most of its products. Earlier this year, the U.S. government was reported to have ceased approving licenses for U.S. companies that are exporting items to Huawei.
