The 5G industries are ramping up competition to drive innovation and diversify the global telecoms supply market. Surprisingly, in the fierce competition of recent years, Taiwan networking solution providers grab the benefits from market share gains, robust customer demand and a new wave of outsourcing from global telecoms. Revenue is expected to grow, supported by a price-friendly environment and a better product portfolio, wireless module makers play an important role behind the picture for driving the success of Taiwan networking supply chains
Founded in 1999, Fibocom is the first wireless modules provider listed in China Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2017. The company invests the resources to provide series of wireless modules. The 5G product lines of the company have been applied in wide ranges of applications and received certificates of global telecoms. Another strength of Fibocom is the ability to control the cost to allow OEM/ODM customers to have a better chance to win the telecom bits. These cost advantages and power features have accelerated the market penetration rate of Taiwan networking equipment makers.
Ronald Chan, General Manager of Taiwan IoT sales division, Fibocom, talks through this interview. Following its strong growth in the China market, Fibocom is aggressively expanding the business of mobile payment market. Especially in the category of Point of Sale systems, Fibocom takes a 45 to 50% worldwide market share.
5G FWA CPE market success driving by cost and engineering efforts
Leveraging the strong growth momentum of the Asia market, since 2014, Fibocom started to enter a strategic partnership and collaborate with Taiwan networking and telecommunication, notebooks and industrial PC industries. The product portfolio is ranging from various communication modules, as well as techniques related to industrial Internet of Things and M2M solutions. Chan points out, Fibocom provides one-stop services to build a tightly bound for mutual benefits by deeply investing in wireless technologies to maintain a long turn strength.
Looking at the PC market, although consumer-grade notebooks have slower growth in 2022, there is still maintaining upbeat in the higher-end commercial notebook models. The entire PC market of Fibocom's business still enjoys a good result. Furthermore, through the collaboration of Intel and Mediatek targeting 5G Modem chips, there is a good future for notebook PC business outlooks. Fibocom has contributed the cost effective modules with excellent price performance ratios.
Apart from the commercial notebook business, the international tenders and competitive bids of the global telecom market are another major sales growth engine of Fibocom. Talking about 5G FWA use cases for rural regions or countryside areas in North America, the end users pay fifty dollars to get a 5G CPE device to massively improve internet connection speed. To chase this opportunity, Taiwan networking solution providers have an aggressively move with the full support from Fibocom through the engineering efforts to pass the telecom's certification tests and refinery cost structure.
Software and testing lab investments strengthening the future opportunities
The new emerging IC design vendors such as Mediatek have tried to change the development landscape of 5G wireless modules very hard. The 5G CPE devices leveraging SoC-based chips combined with software stacks to integrate wireless protocol including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other mainstreaming wireless connectivity with a cost-effective manner. It leads the cost structure of 5G FWA gateway very attractive with powerful features inside. This makes Taiwan networking manufacturers to win telecom competitive bids of North America. Apart from software support, Fibocom has also invested in building a Shielding Room in Taipei for 5G communication testing, providing strong support from both software and test labs to help Taiwan networking manufactures win international telecom bids. Adapting this cooperative experience, Fibocom continues to help Taiwan vendors to penetrate the market of many other countries.
Compared with the success in the global telecom sectors, Industrial IoT (IIoT) market is a different story, said Chan. IIoT requires longer term engagement and steady steps in the market. The series of smart solutions including smart manufacturing, agriculture and medical provide the versatile but small quantity orders. The market is relying on engineering efforts and stronger support with prolonged product verification and approval sequence. Fibocom is gaining because of providing strong technical support to help Industrial PC vendors catching up the business opportunities.
Chan talks about the current economic situation. The downturn directly affects the market segments driving by the pandemic-driven Work-From-Home (WFH) business. The radical spending is decreasing while the slow down or reversing economic growth. And the increasing inflation rates, it looks like another bad news to hit the market further. However, the global enterprises increase the investments for improving the energy efficiency and performance to reaching ESG goals by introducing smart applications.
This will be a fundamentally boost to IIoT sectors. A new driving force implements multiple wireless technologies of Wi-Fi, BT, NB-IoT and Lora fast forwarding the data streams from IoT sensors to smart edge nodes. These trends have helped the IoT gateway devices to play a more active role as a data hub bridging the cloud servers through 4G/LTE and 5G technologies. Those are related to the devices or solutions with wireless modules. Backed by solid technical expertise, Fibocom looks at this new opportunity and is actively working with Taiwan industrial PC, networking and electronic manufacturing service providers to build Taiwan's competitiveness. Looking into the future of 5G construction, there is still room for continuous improvement. Fibocom accurately grasps the trend of 5G commercialization, insists on promoting digital transformation to unlock the full potential of the future IoT business.
Apart from software support, Fibocom has also invested in building a Shielding Room in Taipei for 5G communication testing, providing strong support from both software and test labs to help Taiwan networking manufactures win international telecom bids.
