Semiconductor History | 賽格廣場, 華強北 — The Street a Turnkey Chipset Rebuilt

Ten floors of electronics stalls fill the base of the tower on the right of this photograph, and for a few years many of the phones that came out of this district ran on silicon drawn in Hsinchu.

From 2004 聯發科技 (MediaTek) sold what the industry called a turnkey solution: the baseband chip, a reference board, and the software that made a handset work, in one package.

A company with no radio engineers and no software team could buy it, choose a shell, a screen and a battery, and have a phone.

華強北 supplied everything else. The component stalls were already here, the mould shops were an hour away in 東莞, and the assembly capacity was all over the Pearl River Delta.

Chinese trade accounts describe the chain in one line: MediaTek to the design houses in Shanghai, to the integrators in 華強北, to the mould makers, to the dealers.

Until late 2007 a mainland company needed state approval to manufacture handsets at all, so phones built this way were sold without names and called 黑手機.

In October 2007 the State Council ended the production-approval regime and replaced it with network-access licensing. The phones could carry a brand, and the word that stuck to them was 山寨.

What followed was not only imitation, though there was plenty of that, along with cloned casings and no warranty standing behind any of it.

It was also the cheapest phones anyone had built. They reached buyers in Chinese villages, and then in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, years before a smartphone was affordable there.

The Chinese press gave MediaTek's chairman the nickname 山寨機之父, which was not entirely meant as praise, and plenty of licensed manufacturers were buying the same chips.

The 山寨 handset was finished by about 2018, displaced by cheap branded Android phones from the same country.

賽格電子市場 still trades electronics, and so does 華強電子世界 across the road, but several of the neighbouring digital malls turned to imported cosmetics after 2017.

The stalls that remain sell repair parts, phone cases and components by the reel, which is what this street did before the chipset arrived and what it does now.

Photo: Charlie fong, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (華強北路 looking north from 深南中路, with 賽格廣場 on the right, February 2021).

Second image: a phone and accessory wholesale centre in 華強北, November 2024, CC0.