Apple Announces Multibillion-dollar Deal with Broadcom

By Anshel Sag, Patrick Moorhead - May 23, 2023

Apple announced a multibillion-dollar deal with Broadcom for components made in the USA. Apple’s announcement with Broadcom serves multiple purposes, it builds a stronger relationship with an existing trusted supplier, and it also helps strengthen Apple’s US investment story, which will help it politically, especially leveraging 5G.

Broadcom will build RF front-end components for Apple in a multi-year multi-million dollar deal. This could cut companies like Skyworks and Qorvo out of future RF front-end deals or significantly reduce their share since Apple favors supplier diversity.

Broadcom has long been a supplier to Apple for RF front-end components, even before Avago acquired Broadcom and went by its old name. This partnership is quite established, and it is unclear whether this release is a significant expansion of that relationship.
The prominence of 5G as part of this release serves two purposes, it talks about Apple as a leader in 5G and tees the company up for its own modem, which I believe Apple wants a more tightly coupled product. This sets Apple up for a big announcement of its own modem soon.

Apple will push Qualcomm out eventually, but that was always the plan. It’s unclear when this will happen exactly, but one thing is quite clear: Apple won’t be doing it alone. Broadcom is going to be a big part of enabling that RF front-end for iPhones, iPads, and more.

Anshel Sag

VP & Principal Analyst | Website | + posts

Anshel Sag is Moor Insights & Strategy’s in-house millennial with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry. Anshel has had extensive experience working with consumers and enterprises while interfacing with both B2B and B2C relationships, gaining empathy and understanding of what users really want. Some of his earliest experience goes back as far as his childhood when he started PC gaming at the ripe of old age of 5 while building his first PC at 11 and learning his first programming languages at 13.

Patrick Moorhead

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Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.