Taiwan's MediaTek did not attract a lot of international attention when it became one of the biggest chip suppliers for optical disc drives in personal computers in 2002, nor when it achieved the same dominance in DVD players a year later.

It took MediaTek's recent success with supplying mobile phone chips to Chinese manufacturers to catapult it to prominence as the world's fourth-largest “fabless” chip company – fabless chipmakers do not own their own production facilities but outsource the work.

China's burgeoning mobile phone industry has also made Taiwan's biggest chip design company a rare winner in the economic downturn. While sales by Taiwanese chip vendors fell 8.7 per cent last year, MediaTek's revenue grew by 17 per cent, according to Gartner, the research company.