Consulting firm Gartner recently released preliminary statistics on the global semiconductor market for 2017. The report said that South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. surpassed its American competitor Intel to become the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer.
As we all know, Intel is the world's largest semiconductor maker since 1992. But until 2017, the winner of the championship, Samsung top challenge Intel dominance.
Data show that last year, Samsung's sales increased 52.6% to 612 billion US dollars, a market share of 14.6% .Intel sales increased only 6.7% to 57.7 billion US dollars, accounting for 13.8% of the market share while the global semiconductor revenue of 4,197,000,000,000 US dollar, an increase of 22.2%.
Currently, Samsung Electronics is the world's largest maker of memory chips, memory chips for smart phones, tablets, PCs and servers is essential, and with the strong market demand, which is Samsung Electronics chip sales continued to rise the biggest reason. Intel is good at producing a CPU chip for personal computers, however, consumer demand for such equipment declined.
According to Gartner, under-provisioning drives storage chip revenue up 64% and accounts for 31% of total semiconductor revenue, making it the largest semiconductor category.
Last year, NAND flash memory chip prices for the first time in history to achieve growth, an increase of 17%; DRAM memory chip prices increased by 44%.
According to previous reports, in fact, DRAM and NAND flash memory chip prices soared from 2016. Authoritative computer magazine PCMag has analyzed the reasons, said that this is mainly due to Chinese consumers as more and more Chinese consumers began The purchase of high-end equipment, the surge in demand for memory chips, while the Chinese mainland manufacturers are still unable to produce these high-end chips, leading to price increases.
However, Andrew Norwood, vice president of research at Gartner, said Samsung's lead is not solidly dependent on memory chips. "NAND flash memory chips bear the brunt of memory chip prices as China expands its storage capacity. DRAM memory Chip prices will also decline in 2019. We expect Samsung will lose a lot of revenue by then. "
2017 was a relatively quiet year for M & A deals for chip companies Qualcomm acquired NXP Semiconductors originally was considered a big deal back in 2017 but did not end there, although Qualcomm is still planning to do so in 2018 The deal was completed in years, but it became more complicated as Broadcom tried to acquire Qualcomm.
"In 2017, Broadcom, Qualcomm and NXP with a total revenue of 41.2 billion U.S. dollars only lag behind Samsung and Intel," Andrew Norwood said. "If Broadcom finally finalizes the two acquisitions, Samsung's memory chip revenue like As expected, the market will drop to third place in 2019 as the next wave of memory chips declines.
Therefore, Samsung's first position may not be maintained for too long.
