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Looking sideways at IC Insights' Top 25 chipmakers list |
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Mar 15, 2007 at 11:06 AM |
IC Insights released its list of the worldwide Top 25 chipmakers for 2006 today, in advance of the research group's March update report.
No surprises at the top of the chart---Intel first, Samsung second---nor in the overall health of the leading companies (which grew 11% collectively vs. 2005), even with Intel's sales decline. The leading semiconductor players---IDMs, fab-lite, foundry, and fabless---accounted for $188.9 billion of global chip sales, which represents about 76% of total IC sales last year (pegged at $247.7 billion by SIA/WSTS).
I examined McClean and Co.'s stats and found some interesting bits. For the first time in recent memory, Intel's lead over the next two players---Samsung and Texas Instruments--shrank to the point where if you combined the second- and third-place companies' revenues, they would barely surpass Intel's total. Of course, the idea of a Samsung-TI merger is absurd, but the numbers don't lie.
When you break down the numbers regionally, there's still a huge gap (about $34 billion) between the U.S.-based companies and the next flushest group, the Japanese. Percentage-wise, the U.S. contingent accounts for 41.1% of overall sales. Even if you remove Intel from the equation, the U.S. group till ekes out first place over the Japanese. Korea, Europe, and Taiwan round out the regional rankings.
On the fabless and foundry sides, leaders Qualcomm and TSMC placed 17th and 6th, respectively. If you combined all three fabless outfits' revenues (the others being Broadcom and Nvidia), the resulting conglomerate would have earned over $11 billion, which would have put them in fourth place, ahead of STMicro. If TSMC and UMC are lumped together, the unlikely combo would have garnered $13.4 billion, which would take over the third spot from TI.
When you pool the sales numbers for IBM and its alliance partners---Samsung, Toshiba, Freescale, AMD, Sony, Infineon, and even Qualcomm--the sum hits close to $60.5 billion, or about 32% of the Top 25 total. (The total climbs to almost $62 billion when you throw in Chartered's 2006 revenues, which comes out to about 25% of the SIA/WSTS grand total).
The numbers reveal nothing to be especially wary of, even though today happens to be the Ides of March.
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