The latest ranking of the world’s top semiconductor suppliers has been released by market research firm IC Insights, using data available up to the end of the first quarter of 2014.
As shown in Table 1, the top 20 worldwide semiconductor (IC and O S D – optoelectronic, sensor and discrete) sales ranking for 1Q14 includes nine suppliers headquartered in the US, three in Taiwan, three in Europe, two in South Korea, two in Japan and one in Singapore, a relatively broad representation of geographic regions.
The top 20 includes three pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries and UMC) and six fabless companies. It is interesting to note that the top four semiconductor suppliers all have different business models: Intel is essentially a pure-play IDM, Samsung a vertically integrated IC supplier, TSMC a pure-play foundry and Qualcomm a fabless company.
Outside of the top five spots, there were numerous changes within the 1Q14 top 20 semiconductor supplier ranking. As shown, MediaTek jumped up four positions in 1Q14 as compared to 1Q13 into 12th place. This company continues to experience extremely strong demand for its devices in the booming low-end smartphone business in China and other Asia-Pacific locations. Moreover, MediaTek and MStar finalised their merger in February this year, which is expected to boost the combined company’s sales to well over $6 billion.
After Avago’s purchase of LSI Corp. Just last month, the combined annual semiconductor sales run-rate of the two companies is likely to be over $5 billion. Also, last year’s Micron/Elpida merger essentially created a new giant semiconductor company with Micron’s sales expected to top $17 billion in 2014.
Another potential merger to keep a watch for in the future is Fujitsu and Panasonic. Earlier this year, the two Japan-based companies signed a memorandum of understanding to combine the two companies’ system LSI businesses and form a new fabless semiconductor company. IC Insights estimates that the combined 1Q14 semiconductor sales of these two companies was about $1,25 billion (down from $1,44 billion in 1Q13), which would have ranked the merged entity as the sixteenth largest semiconductor company in the first quarter of this year.
In total, the top 20 semiconductor companies’ sales increased by 9% in 1Q14 as compared to 1Q13, which was two points higher than IC Insights’ current 7% forecast for total worldwide semiconductor market growth this year. As shown, it took total semiconductor sales of just over $1,0 billion to make the 1Q14 top 20 ranking.
Table 2 shows that there was a 58 percentage-point range of year-over-year growth rates among the 1Q14 worldwide top 20 semiconductor suppliers – from +48% for MediaTek/MStar to -10% for ST (it should be noted that excluding the legacy ST-Ericsson products, ST’s 1Q14/1Q13 sales actually increased 1%).
The success of the fabless and fab-lite business models and the continued strong growth of the memory market are evident when examining the top 20 semiconductor suppliers that logged double-digit growth in 1Q14. As shown, 10 of the top 11 1Q14 performers were either memory suppliers (SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung) or fabless/fab-lite companies (MediaTek, AMD, Infineon, Freescale, Avago/LSI, NXP and Nvidia).
For more information visit www.icinsights.com
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