"A very interesting development for the chipset competitive landscape is Intel ending its partnership with Unisoc (Spreadtrum or state-owned Tsinghua backed). Intel, MediaTek and Unisoc have been facing an onslaught from Qualcomm on one end and losing big-scale clients such as Huawei, Samsung on the other. With the rest of the market shrinking, Intel’s partnership was supposed to be the step for Unisoc to scale up to mid-tier from entry-tier solutions. However, it looks like Intel has got out of the partnership and wants to directly sell to Chinese OEMs. It appears that Unisoc has not made any progress to help Intel drive scale which it was hoping for via Unisoc's local business for its foundry. Also, protecting its IP with the ongoing US-China trade war must be another reason which could have prompted Intel to end the partnership. It will be difficult for Unisoc to climb up the mid-to-high-tier with 5G around the corner, but maybe it can scale 4G chipsets in emerging markets over the next couple of years." – Neil Shah