Qualcomm is slated to hit a 30 percent market share from China's smartphone industry, a figure that the chipmaker has not enjoyed since the second quarter of 2012.

The first quarter is the slow season in the China application processor market. Although application processor shipments are expected to decrease to 16 percent in the first quarter this year, Qualcomm's shipment will only drop by 12 percent.

The continued surging demand is driven by the LTE-Cat. 7 support, which is an LTE Advanced user equipment that can support up to 300 megabits per second downloads. Currently, only Qualcomm offers devices that support Cat. 7 and is "the only supplier that is trusted to provide reliable products at this point," DigiTimes noted.

That being said, although AP shipments in China suffered by 10 percent in the fourth quarter in 2016, Qualcomm enjoyed a 19 percent increase.

However, Qualcomm's China gain is coming at the expense of MediaTek. The company only posted a 1.4 percent increase on its shipment in the fourth quarter, owing to the lack of the Cat. 7 product "to satisfy the market."

Of note, MediaTek's current flagship chips, the Helio X20 series, only offer Cat. 6 LTE. During the MWC 2017, MediaTek launched its new deca-core SoC Helio X30  that could support a Cat. 10 LTE modem with a theoretical speed of 450 megabits per second. It also boasts of an intelligent task switcher called the CorePilot 4.0. But mobile devices powered by this chip are not expected to be shipped until the second quarter of this year.

Even with the release of MediaTek's X30, MediaTek is expected to still face more hurdles in the first quarter of 2017, with its shipment forecasted to slide down to as low as 18.6 percent. Moreover, its China share market is also anticipated to drop below 40 percent for the first time since the first quarter of 2012.