In the second half of last year, there were reports that Vivo was going to enter the field of mobile phone chips. Vivo denied this, however, saying it's a misreading.
But on May 9, Weibo digital blogger @数码闲聊站 exposed two chip trademarks that Vivo applied for, seemingly proving Vivo's ambitions for mobile phone chips.
These two trademarks are "Vivo SOC" and "Vivo chip", which were also filed in the second half of last year - September 2019.
The trademark covers product categories such as central processors, modems, computer chips, printed circuits, computer storage devices, and more.
Of course, applying for a chip trademark does not mean that Vivo will learn from Huawei Kirin to develop a mobile phone chip from scratch, Vivo is more likely to be like Microsoft to customize a chip with chip manufacturers (Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung).
The above Weibo users also said: "Big Blue factory is very tolerant, and before the small blue factory like the throughput of Qualcomm, MediaTek and Orion, started to jointly customize the chip again."
It's unclear when this possible Vivo custom chip will be released.