TAIPEI — In the China smartphone market, Apple has seen better days.

Despite having reported record sales of the iPhone 5, the U.S. technology giant’s presence on the mainland flagged in 2012; it was pushed out of the top five smartphone makers in that market during the third quarter, with just 8 percent of the market, according to the research firm Canalys.

As Coolpad, Huawei, Lenovo, Samsung and ZTE surged ahead of Apple, a major force behind their success was MediaTek, a Taiwanese chip maker whose products have drastically reduced the cost for manufacturers of getting new phones to market.

The company entered the smartphone business late, introducing its first chipset in 2011 inside a Lenovo phone. But within a year and a half, analysts say, MediaTek has taken 50 percent of China’s market for smartphone chips.

That success has come with the adoption of what MediaTek calls a “turnkey solution.” Rather than simply provide a chip, the company also offers instructions on how to build a phone, the software architecture to run it and dedicated consultants to advise phone makers through the production process. MediaTek’s chief financial officer, David Ku, describes this as a franchise model in which all the clients have to do is “turn on the burner.”