He was once scolded for blocking Ziguang Zhanrui, but now he has sold its technical assets, and Leadcore Technology has withdrawn from the mobile phone chip business
UNISOC Leadcore Technology
On March 25, Datang Telecom issued an announcement saying that the 16th meeting of the company's eighth board of directors reviewed and approved the "Proposal on the Transfer of LC1860 Chip and LC1881 Chip Related Technologies and Assets from Leadcore Technology to Chenxin Technology", and agreed with the company. Subsidiary Lianxin Technology and others transferred some supporting assets related to LC1860 chip, LC1881 chip related technology and supporting assets to Chenxin Technology, a subsidiary of the company's controlling shareholder, involving a total transaction amount of 33.646 million yuan (excluding tax).

It can be seen from the asset evaluation report released later that the main body of the asset transfer of 33.646 million yuan is the intangible assets with the LC1881 chip as the core, including the complete design technology of the LC1881 chip, including IP, layout design and chip verification methods. The assessed value of these assets reached 30.1 million yuan.
Once the "star of hope" of China's mobile phone chips
In the field of local mobile phone chips, Leadcore Technology and Ziguang Zhanrui can be said to be brilliant for a while. Because of the establishment of Lingsheng Technology, the two sides were fighting all over the city. But now, with UNISOC's 4G chips gaining a firm foothold and 5G chips starting to take off, Leadcore Technology has been sold off of its core technology assets. How can one not feel embarrassed.
Leadcore Technology was established in 2008. As the core enterprise of Datang Telecom in the layout of integrated circuits, Leadcore is engaged in the research and development and application of 2G, 3G and 4G mobile Internet terminal core technologies, and can provide 3G/4G mobile terminal chips and solutions.
The LC1881 chip can be regarded as the last highlight moment of Leadcore Technology. On June 29, 2016, at the 2016 Mobile World Congress Shanghai Exhibition, Leadcore Technology displayed the LC1881 in the integrated circuit exhibition area of ​​Datang Telecom. As written in the asset evaluation report, this is a 64-bit eight-core five-mode LTE SoC, supporting LTE Cat.6, is an Android 6.0 terminal solution chip. In terms of network transmission, LC1881 adopts 2×20 dual carrier aggregation, and the downlink rate reaches 300Mbps.
Of course, in the course of development of Leadcore Technology in the past ten years, there are not only two products of LC1860 chip and LC1881 chip. In fact, Leadcore Technology also had relatively stable product iterations before 2016.
In April 2010, Leadcore officially released INNOPOWER series chips and solutions;
In April 2011, Leadcore released INNOPOWER series chips: LC1710, LC1711, LC1760;
In May 2012, Leadcore released INNOPOWER series chips: LC1761, LC1810, LC1712, LC1713;
In August 2013, Leadcore released the quad-core smartphone chip LC1813 and the quad-core tablet computer chip LC1913;
In Q3 2014, Leadcore Technology announced the five-mode single-chip LC1860, which adopts the innovative design of "4G+28nm".
Although the LC1881 chip is the protagonist in the transfer of Leadcore Technology, it has to be said that the most successful chip of Leadcore Technology in recent years is the LC1860 chip. From the third quarter of 2014 to July 2015, the LC1860 chip has been It has completed the shipment of nearly 10 million units. Among them, the Redmi 2A using the LC1860 chip has sold 5.1 million units from its official launch in April 2015 to July 23. And, because the LC1860 chip adopts the industry-leading software radio technology SDR technology, it can also be extended to other consumer electronics fields.
Today, you can also see the case introduction of Leadcore Technology on the official website of Synopsys China. With the help of Synopsys DesignWare MIPI IP, Leadcore Technology achieved a one-time success in the silicon design of smartphone application processors, shortening the time to market. 4 months. And this chip is the LC1810 chip of the year.
Leadcore's rapid growth at that time was highly expected by the industry, hoping that it would become the "Gemini" of domestic mobile phone chips together with UNISOC.
Living in the shadow of Ziguang Zhanrui
Whether it was the rapid development period from 2008 to 2015, or after 2016, Leadcore Technology has always had a stronger competitor in the field of local mobile phone chips, which is the previous Spreadtrum and later UNISOC.
Spreadtrum, established in 2001, has a luxurious start-up team composed of more than 30 high-end talents from overseas returnees. Now these people are the core figures in all aspects of domestic chips, including Wu Ping and Chen Datong, who focus on investment. According to Chen Datong's later memories, Spreadtrum completed the 2.5G mobile phone chip design in only 6 months, and mass-produced the chip in two years.
When Leadcore released the LC1813 in 2013, Spreadtrum had already achieved a breakthrough of $1 billion in revenue. According to relevant statistics, by 2016, Spreadtrum and RDA had become MediaTek's main rivals in the low-end mobile phone chip market, and Qualcomm's share was very small at that time.
Leadcore Technology, which failed to continue the fiery momentum of the LC1860 chip, signed an agreement with Jianguang Assets, Datang Telecom, Qualcomm Holdings, and Zhilu Capital on May 26, 2017, announcing the establishment of Lingsheng Technology, focusing on the mass market. Smartphone chipset design, packaging, testing, customer support and sales.
This is a multi-party cooperation including Leadcore Technology, and the positioning of the low-end smartphone market. Obviously, this is aimed at Ziguang Zhanrui, so it was questioned in the local chip circle and was then called by Ziguang. Zhao Weiguo, chairman of the group, publicly "shelled". We can't blame Zhao Weiguo, disregarding his identity, and scolding him. Under the current situation, Qualcomm's technology, Leadcore's research and development, and the capital of Jianguang and Zhilu were indeed capable of bringing the newly emerging Unisplendour to the fore. (Let's put it this way, although Spreadtrum and RDA have not officially merged at that time) to block the low-end mobile phone chip market.
Lingsheng Technology should be the last time the public focused on Leadcore Technology. As the situation calmed down, Ziguang Zhanrui still grew up. Although Lingsheng Technology still mentioned in the introduction that it provides smartphone chips However, it is not difficult to see from the official press release that the company has now fully embraced the AIoT market, and has successfully attracted the participation of Xiaomi Changjiang Industrial Fund. Smart Vision Applications.
Under the condition that both opponents and teammates are developing well, Leadcore Technology itself has fallen behind, and until today, it has returned to the public eye by selling its technical assets.
implicated by the parent company
The unsmooth development of Leadcore Technology is also related to the parent company Datang Telecom, which has been showing signs of decline since 2015. According to Datang Telecom's 2015 financial report, the company achieved operating income of 8.603 billion yuan in 2015, a year-on-year increase of 7.75%; net profit was 28.4439 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 86.89%. By 2016, Datang Telecom had a loss of more than one billion yuan, and in 2017, the loss further expanded to more than two billion yuan. Datang Telecom has always wanted to reverse its decline, but the amount of loss in the 2020 financial report still exceeds 1.3 billion yuan. In the disclosed third quarter financial report of 2021, the year-on-year decline appeared in multiple links.
In the state of continuous losses, Datang Telecom has become powerless to try to build Leadcore Technology, which requires huge investment. And the sale of technical assets is not the only recent effort by Leadcore to help the parent company get its money back. According to the recent announcement of Xinlei Neng, the company received the "Notice of Completion of Shareholders' Shareholding Reduction Plan" issued by Leadcore Technology on March 21, 2022. As of the date of this announcement, Leadcore Technology's shareholding reduction plan has expired. . During the period, Leadcore Technology reduced its holdings of Xinleineng shares by 50,000 shares.
According to estimates, the technology transfer of Leadcore Technology is expected to achieve a profit of 11 million yuan for Datang Telecom as a whole. This actually does not play a big role in the huge loss, but Datang Telecom does not have any extra money at this time. I can vote for Leadcore Technology to continue working on smartphone chips.
Some people will say, isn't Chenxin Technology on the transferee side a subsidiary of Leadcore Technology? Isn't that just a matter of changing the name? But this is not the case. Chenxin Technology, which was established by Leadcore Technology by selling 32.57% of Chenxin Technology and China Xinke, is now a subsidiary of Chenxin Technology, and the major shareholder of Chenxin Technology is China Xinke, which holds 25.9334 shares. %, Datang Telecom is only the third shareholder.

Source: Enterprise Check
postscript
Although domestic chips are the current popular track, for each individual domestic chip company, this is a battlefield, not only facing the dimensionality reduction blow of international giant manufacturers, but also from time to time with other local chip manufacturers in the low-end market. Introduced, those who can break out of the siege and stand as the leader of domestic chips have experienced a transformation and are much more determined than when they were first established. However, starting a business is a life-and-death situation, and it is more likely to fail in the capital-intensive, talent-intensive, and technology-intensive chip field. Although Leadcore Technology has not fallen, it is difficult for us to hear this name in the field of domestic mobile phone chips since then.