A Study on Competitive Advantage Factor of MediaTek

The United States and Taiwan have dominated the global semiconductor (IC) design (fabless) business. So, it is meaningful to analyze the competitiveness of Taiwan’s fabless business through the MediaTek, a leading fab- less of Taiwan. In order to access the competitive advantage of MediaTek, two kinds of comparison are to be made; MediaTek vs. Qualcomm, and MediaTek vs. fabless business of Taiwan. The revenue, operating profit, revenue to R&D expense ratio and average revenue per employee in 2010~2021 are main indicators of the comparison. Also, the clustering advantage of Taiwan is to be reviewed to manage the competitive advantage of MediaTek because Taiwan is almost only one region in the world to cover all the four types of IC businesses; fabless, foundry, memory & other production, packaging & testing. As a result, the MediaTek leads the R&D capability upgrade of Taiwan’s fabless business. Above all, it can be said that competitive advantage of MediaTek comes from the clustering advantage of IC industry because most of the collaborating partners are local firms of Taiwan. Such a clustering advantage rooted in Taiwan is very difficult to be copied by others outside of Taiwan because it is a specific knowledge based on a regional feature for a long time.