Sources: Apple is designing its own power-management chips for use in iPhones from as early as 2018; current supplier Dialog Semiconductor sees shares drop ~19%
Cheng-Ting-Fang / Nikkei :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is another step in Apple's quiet campaign to pull silicon design in-house. Weeks earlier, sources reported iPhones and iPads that would exclude Qualcomm modem chips in favor of Intel or MediaTek parts, and Bloomberg had already reported a low-power ARM chip for Mac power duties — so power management was the next component on the list.
The market reaction tells you what is at stake for suppliers: Dialog Semiconductor's ~19% share drop prices in the loss of its largest customer relationship. The same playbook would later hit Intel when reports emerged that Apple planned to replace Intel processors in Macs from 2020.
First-order effects
- Dialog Semiconductor loses pricing leverage over its biggest product line — with Apple designing its own power-management chips for iPhones as early as 2018, Dialog's revenue base becomes dependent on winning back sockets or finding new customers.
Second-order effects
- Other Apple-dependent chip suppliers now face the same template: if Apple can internalize power management, no analog or mixed-signal socket is safe, pressuring rivals like Qualcomm — already being designed out of modems per the WSJ report — and pushing Dialog toward diversification.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across the corpus: Apple's in-house silicon program expands from application processors to power management to Mac CPUs (own Mac chips from 2021) — and by 2020 the strategy cuts both ways, with Apple grappling with a shortage of power management chips, showing that insourcing trades supplier risk for supply-chain control it must then manage itself.
The trend: Apple is systematically converting merchant-chip purchases into internally designed silicon, forcing single-customer suppliers like Dialog Semiconductor to restructure around the loss.