MediaTek, Taiwan’s largest chip designer, said it plans to increase its R&D headcount by about a fifth this year as it aims to grab a bigger piece of the long-term evolution (LTE) smartphone market from Qualcomm.

“We are hiring people aggressively,” said MediaTek CFO David Ku, during a conference call with analysts following the company’s announcement of 4Q 2014 results. “We are still quite positive about the LTE market globally.”

The company expects to hire about 2,000 people this year, according to Ku. Most of the investment will not contribute to the company’s financial results until next year, he added.

Qualcomm, which dominates the LTE business, faces increased competition as its largest rival, MediaTek, pared the US company’s market share in the LTE baseband business during the third quarter last year, according to Strategy Analytics. Qualcomm’s LTE market share dropped to less than 80 percent in the third quarter for the first time, from 95 percent a year earlier, the market research firm said.

The worldwide LTE business is just starting to take off. The global market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 78.6 percent from 2013 to 2019, reaching a total of US$610.7 billion by 2019, according to an October 2014 report by Transparency Market Research.

Soaring shipments
MediaTek forecast that its shipments of LTE products this year will soar to 150 million units from about 30 million last year. The company said it expects to ship more than 450 million chips for smartphones in 2015, an increase of almost a third from the 350 million units that MediaTek predicts for 2014.

MediaTek said it aims to ship 80 to 85 million smartphone chips during the first quarter of this year.

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