Forecast that a market is going to grow by a third, and investors start to salivate. Tell them it is smartphones, and mouths go dry. There was a time when owning Samsung or Apple and shorting BlackBerry or HTC was an easy trade. But things got harder a year or two ago; competition appears to be eroding high-end handset profits.

Low-end chips are a different story. MediaTek designs cheap chipsets that allow lower-end phonemakers to take on the big brands.

It is gaining traction just as emerging market demand is set to soar. Shipments will rise by a third this year (against 16 per cent in the developed world), thinks Credit Suisse. That wave will be led by the likes of Lenovo, ZTE, Coolpad and Xiaomi, among other Chinese brands, which expect shipments to jump about 50 per cent. Profits are still a problem, however: less than a sixth of phone gross profits go to makers of models under $300, versus two-thirds to the top end, according to CLSA. Emerging market makers are home turf to MediaTek, though. Handset profit does not matter much if its chips are in enough phones.