R&D Shopping On The Mezzanine

Having been offline on vacation for most of the past week I’m amazed at how much news I miss. And of course being out of sync with the latest in what’s going on makes tuning in more difficult. However, maybe being a little out of sync is a good thing, since it got me to read something I might not have made time to read. BusinessWeek has an interesting article on Chinese handset design corporation TechFaith. It’s not long and worth the read. I have to wonder if there’s room for a mid-position R&D player and consequently whether TechFaith will eventually become a larger corporation (ala Palm or RIM), perhaps shrink (as indicated by the downward valuation of their stock) to be more of a niche market player, or somehow hold the middle ground.