For most smartphone makers, having their own mobile processors brings two main benefits, diversity and better supply chain control, but few in house chip efforts have paid off at the moment. Not many successful cases following Apple, Huawei and Samsung.There is plenty of entry barriers, One being the continuous efforts of a large team is required, as are complicated system integrations.
Overheads are also increasing as chip manufacturing technology develops. For instance Xiaomi, smartphone maker set up a semiconductor design team way back in 2014. They currently don’t use in house processors for its smartphones. Xiaomi leading smartphones use Qualcomm’s high end Snapdragon chipsets.
Also one of the risks is the chips they develop might not perform as reliably as industry standard semiconductors from proven suppliers.
And on another note, Alibaba are in the reckoning to buy chipmaker Tsinghua of China