Interestingly, STMicroelectronics moved up a position to third with revenues of $1.8 billion, up 21 percent from 2004. STMicroelectronics has been targeting China for several years now and seems to executing well on its plan to penetrate the China market further, especially in respect to set top boxes, according to iSuppli. The soon to be completed JV fab with Hynix should further assist its growth strategies in the country in 2007 and beyond.

Notably one company not listed in the Top Ten chip suppliers to China was AMD! According to iSuppli's Top Twenty list AMD had fallen from being ranked 13 in 2004 to being ranked number 16 in 2005, a 14.1 percent decline!

However, iSuppli highlighted that this was due to the separation of Spansion's NOR Flash revenues in China due to the spin-off and subsequent IPO of the Flash division from AMD.

Looking only at the microprocessor revenues from Intel, AMD and IBM provided by iSuppli and a completely different story emerges.

Intel saw revenues increase by 9.1 percent in 2005, reaching $3.8 billion in sales and dominating market share with 75.3 percent of the market.

However, IBM saw revenues grow 11750 percent (that's not a typo error) coming off almost non-existent sales ($4.0 million) in 2004 to see revenues sky-rocket to $474 million in 2005. This we believe is almost entirely due to IBM's sale of its PC business unit to China based Lenovo Group. It will be interesting to see how much further growth IBM can achieve in 2006?

Significantly, AMD has seen revenues grow 86.4 percent in 2005 compared to 2004. Revenues reached $451 million in 2005 putting the company in third place behind IBM and Intel.

With greater manufacturing capacity coming on stream in 2006 via Fab36 and Chartered Semiconductor, AMD is well placed to continue to grow market share in this important market. Based on iSuppli's figures Intel is seeing better revenue growth from non-MPU devices in China, which may help AMD and IBM gain further traction in the MPU market segment.