3G iPhone’s Top 5 Component Beneficiaries

The 3G iPhone is out. Besides Apple, who else is a beneficiary of this major PR event? Here, we look at the top five component vendors: Infineon, Triquint, Samsung, Broadcom and Interdigital.

The teardown analysis shows Infineon and Triquint Semiconductor as the two biggest winners.

Triquint has 3 Power Amps and Infineon has the Digital Baseband Processor, a UMTS Transceiver, a Power Management and a GPS chip – an amazing total of four sockets.

Let’s look at the two stocks:

We will be writing a lot more on Infineon and will also start tracking Triquint. Meanwhile, you can read up on Vijay Nagarajan’s analysis of Infineon.

Also, Samsung still has the Application Processor and Broadcom has the Touchscreen Controller. Samsung will likely eventually lose this socket, but for now it remains a key beneficiary of the 3G iPhone. Intel is after this socket with its Atom chip, as are others.

I pegged Broadcom as a bargain back in March, and since then the stock has risen quite a bit. My guess: it will move further up as functionality starts to consolidate from the board to the chip.

The final company on our list is not a direct component supplier to Apple, but rather one that most likely reaps royalties due to its Intellectual Property position: InterDigital. The company did an IP licensing deal with Apple last year, but not much detail is available otherwise. Their earnings is coming up in early August, and we will have to wait till then to see what is the impact of the 3G iPhone on the company.

In addition, Marvell, CSR, National Semiconductor, ST Micro, Numonyx, NXP, and SkyWorks have design wins into the 3G iPhone.