Meizu is attracting the attention of more and more partners

May 7, 2015 12:35 GMT  ·  By

Meizu is one of those Chinese companies that are slowly building a name for themselves in the mobile device industry. First there was Xiaomi, and now Meizu, whose MX4 phone was named the best handset of 2014 by AnTuTu.

Last year, Meizu made an interesting transition by abandoning the use of Samsung’s Exynos chips and adopting low-cost chip maker MediaTek’s offering instead.

The Chinese phone manufacturer was thus the first to roll out a handset with MediaTek’s flagship MT6595 under the hood. And it appears the partnership between the two companies was a fruitful one on both sides.

Since the MX4 came out, the company also released the M1 Note with MT6752 on the inside and the Meizu M1 powered by the MT6732 chip, and now the two companies are taking their working relationship to the next level.

Meizu and MediaTek come closer together

According to a report coming out of Giz China today and citing industry analysts, it appears MediaTek has taken a real interest in Meizu, as the chip maker is said to have actually invested in the Chinese phone maker.

No official information has been given on the number of shares acquired or the amount of money that went into securing the deal.

This piece of news follows Xiaomi’s announcement that it was breaking ties with MediaTek in favor of Qualcomm. We currently don’t know whether the partnership between Mediatek and Meizu is exclusive and whether the latter will have to renounce to Samsung’s services altogether or the terms of the contract are looser.

Back in February, we also brought you news that Chinese retail giant Alibaba was looking to invest a whopping $590 / €520 million in Meizu.

Thus, Alibaba wanted to acquire a minority stake in the company, offering Meizu a host of benefits in the process, like allowing it to have unlimited access to Alibaba’s vast chain of e-commerce sales channels and more.

On top of attracting investors, Meizu has also been rumored to be working with Finnish smartphone icon Nokia towards a special version of the MX4, dubbed Supreme.

The purported phone even leaked into the wild once, and word on the street claimed the Supreme would take advantage of a huge 60MP Nokia PureView frontal camera.

Considering all that, we expect to see Meizu continue the ascending path it has embarked upon.