Shanzhai! MediaTek and the "White Box" Handset Market

Willy C.  Shih; Chen-Fu  Chien; Jyun-Cheng  Wang

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2010 (Revised December 2010)

Shanzhai! MediaTek and the "White Box" Handset Market

by Willy C. Shih, Chen-Fu Chien and Jyun-Cheng Wang

Abstract

The term "white box" is often used to describe products without a brand name. Such products are assembled from standardized parts, and they became a very popular category of desktop PCs. Hsinchu, Taiwan based MediaTek is a fabless semiconductor company that unleashed a white-box market in mobile phone handsets by offering an innovative "complete solution" for 2.5G and 2.7G handset manufacturers, dramatically lowering the barriers to entry into the business. Besides enabling many Chinese branded manufacturers to enter the business, the grey market in components unleashed a complementary market of "Shanzhai" makers. Together these firms captured a significant fraction of the Chinese market, as well as exports (both legal and grey) to 102 countries. CEO Ming-Kai Tsai is faced with the question of the best growth path. While multiple tier one handset makers are dismissive of MediaTek, perhaps because of its role in enabling the Shanzhai, the company's offerings have enabled an "army of ants" to challenge the leaders. Can MediaTek move up-market to sell its chipsets to the likes of Nokia? Under what terms?

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Emerging Markets; Competitive Advantage; Wireless Technology; Semiconductor Industry; Taiwan;

Format: Print

19 pages

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Citation:

Shih, Willy C., Chen-Fu Chien, and Jyun-Cheng Wang. Shanzhai! MediaTek and the "White Box" Handset Market. Harvard Business School Case 610-081, April 2010. (Revised December 2010.)

Case | HBS Case Collection | May 2016 (Revised April 2018)

Building the Digital Manufacturing Enterprise of the Future at Siemens

Willy Shih

This case describes the motivation for and the development of Siemens' digital manufacturing enterprise vision, which became the foundation for its implementation of Industrie 4.0. While the effort started with a purely defensive move by Anton Huber, head of the Digital Factory Division, to protect his core programmable logic controller business from the migration of value to software from hardware, the scope expanded radically as the company completed the acquisition of UGS. It was then able to articulate a complete roadmap from computer-aided product inception and design through simulation and automation system design all the way to the factory floor. The initial implementation at the Electronics Works Amberg became widely cited as the prototype for Industrie 4.0.
The central question of the case is the importance of vertical integration to the delivery of the vision, in the face of pressure for open standards that will expose large parts of the system to competition and price pressure. How will Siemens earn a reasonable rate of return?

Keywords: big data; Internet of Things; internet of everything; Industrie 4.0; digital factory; digital enterprise; digital manufacturing; manufacturing; Production management; Production Planning; Computer software; Germany; German manufacturing; Machinery and Machining; Information Technology; Technology Platform; Technological Innovation; Production; Supply Chain; Life Cycle; Software; Technology Networks; Manufacturing Industry; Germany;

Citation:

Shih, Willy. "Building the Digital Manufacturing Enterprise of the Future at Siemens." Harvard Business School Case 616-060, May 2016. (Revised April 2018.) View Details

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When Dalian Wanda Group of China announced its plan to acquire the AMC Entertainment theatrical exhibition chain in the United States, many people in the U.S. were mystified. Unlike China where theatrical exhibition was experiencing rapid growth, the U.S. market was viewed as mature, and rapidly changing technology was giving consumers a widening range of choices for movie viewing. AMC was owned by a group of private equity firms, and their pessimistic view of the industry influenced their strategies and investment decisions. AMC's management team had yet a different view on the prospects of the industry. Thus three present or potential stakeholders, all looking at the same data, had distinctly different views of future prospects. How could this be? The (B) case looks at AMC's performance in the year after the acquisition.

When Dalian Wanda Group of China announced its plan to acquire the AMC Entertainment theatrical exhibition chain in the United States, many people in the U.S were mystified. Unlike China where theatrical exhibition was experiencing rapid growth, the U.S. market was viewed as mature, and rapidly changing technology was giving consumers a widening range of choices for movie viewing. AMC was owned by a group of private equity firms, and their pessimistic view of the industry influenced their strategies and investment decisions. AMC's management team had yet a different view on the prospects of the industry. Thus three present or potential stakeholders, all looking at the same data, had distinctly different views of future prospects. How could this be? The (B) case looks at AMC's performance in the year after the acquisition.

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Shanzhai! MediaTek and the "White Box" Handset Market

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