MediaTek is Getting Ready to Spin off its Airoha Subsidiary

You’d be forgiven if you’re not familiar with Airoha, as although the company has been around since 2001, it’s been a company that has mostly been flying under the radar. Back in 2007, Mediatek became a majority shareholder by buying out Benq’s stake in Airoha and a decade later, MediaTek merged some of its business units into Airoha, which is the opposite way to how it normally goes. MediaTek is getting ready to list Airoha on the Taiwanese stock market and this comes with several benefits to the company. Airoha’s main product line is Bluetooth chips, but it also makes various solutions for GPS/GNSS, WiFi, DVB-S and xPON internet gateways and routers. Sony is one of its major customers, after the company switched from Qualcomm to MediaTek/Airoha a few years ago. Other customers are said to be Beats by Apple, JBL by Harman (which in turn is owned by Samsung), Skullcandy and Xiaomio.

The company is said to first be listed on Taiwan’s Emerging Stock Market for at least six months-a requirement by Taiwanese law-before the company will be making a full IPO. The company is said to be valued at US$3.3 billion, so despite being a mostly unheard of company, we’re not talking about some little startup here. MediaTek is expecting Airoha to see a revenue growth of around 30 percent in 2022, from 2021 revenues of around US$562 million. As these things go, it would appear that the main reason for listing Airoha isn’t directly to make money, but rather to try and appeal to current and future employees. This is because of the peculiar bonus structure in most companies in Taiwan, where all employees are given a share of the profits, largely regardless of their personal and departments performance. With Airoha going public, its employees will no longer have to share their bonuses with MediaTek employees, which could in theory lead to better bonuses for their employees.