Sporton busy fulfilling orders for inspecting 5G sub-6GHz chips, handsets

Taiwan-based Sporton International has been busy fulfilling orders from MediaTek for testing and certifying its 5G sub-6 GHz mobile SoCs as well as orders from Chinese handset vendors for inspecting their 5G smartphones to help them win approvals from international verification organizations, according to industry sources.

The mobile testing and certification specialist has since March this year received orders from MediaTek for its new Dimensity series SoCs for 5G sub-6GHz smartphones to be adopted by Chinese handset vendors including Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, the sources said.

Sporton has also tapped into the supply chains of the handset vendors in China, helping their 5G smartphones win approvals from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other similar international certification bodies to facilitate their sales in overseas markets, the sources said.

Sporton has received more than 30 testing and inspecting cases for diverse 5G smartphones, customer premise equipment (CPE) and routers so far this year, and the number is expected to double by the end of 2020, the sources said. And up to 80% of the cases are associated with Frequency Range 1 (FR1) or sub 6-GHz applications and mostly from Chinese clients, and 20% for FR2 with mmWave specs mainly from clients in Japan and the US, the sources said.

Sporton has seen capacity utilization at labs in Taiwan and China rebound to pre-pandemic levels, and is expected to attain a double-digit on-year revenue growth in 2020, with its business to peak in the third quarter, the sources said.

Meanwhile, tougher US sanctions on Huawei has prompted the Chinese tech giant to step up purchasing non-US chips solutions, which have to be re-tested and inspected before being applied to the vendor's handsets or other CPE devices, providing short-term extra business opportunities for Sporton, Materials Analysis Technology (MA-tek) and Integrated Service Technology (iST), the sources added.