Samsung Electronics reclaims top spot in semiconductor market

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Samsung Electronics reclaims top spot in semiconductor market

[JOONGANG PHOTO]

[JOONGANG PHOTO]

 
Samsung Electronics reclaimed the No. 1 spot in the fast-growing global semiconductor market, surpassing Intel last year, a report showed Friday.
 
The Connecticut-based market tracker Gartner found that Samsung Electronics retook the top spot, albeit narrowly, with annual semiconductor sales of $73.2 billion in 2021, up 28 percent year-on-year.
 
Intel, its closest rival, fell to second place with $72.5 billion, a 0.3 percent drop from the previous year. Intel fell behind Samsung by a slender margin of 0.1 percentage points in terms of market share, as Samsung took up 12.3 percent of the total market sales while the U.S. chipmaker claimed 12.2 percent.  
 
SK hynix remained in third with a sales increase of 40.6 percent bringing it to $36.4 billion. U.S. memory chip manufacturer Micron Technology’s sales grew 31.4 percent to $28.6 billion. SK hynix and Micron Technology garnered market shares of 6.1 percent and 4.8 percent, respectively.
 
Qualcomm came in fifth, with an annual sales growth rate of 53.4 percent, to $27.1 billion. Broadcom, headquartered in California, reported a 19.3 percent sales jump to $18.8 billion. Taiwanese fabless company MediaTek followed with annual sales of $17.6 billion, up 60.2 percent on year.
 
Texas Instruments and Nvidia posted annual sales of $17.2 billion and $16.8 billion, up 26.8 percent and 58.0 percent each.
 
AMD reported the biggest growth among the top 10 companies at 68.6 percent to $16.3 billion, and moved up to 10th place from the previous year's 14th.
 
Meanwhile, Huawei’s fabless unit HiSilicon saw a sharp decline of a whopping 81 percent to $1.5 billion, in the wake of U.S. sanctions against the Chinese company over security concerns.  
 
Last year marked the first time that worldwide semiconductor sales surpassed the $500 billion threshold.
 
According to Gartner, global annual sales in the semiconductor sector totaled $595 billion, a 26.3 percent jump compared to 2020, driven by the strong demand for automobile and smartphone chips. Semiconductor sales in wireless communications, which include mobile device manufacturing, climbed 24.6 percent on year while automotive chip sales grew 34.9 percent.
 
The memory sector accounted for 27.9 percent of the total sales. The memory chip sales increased by 33.2 percent, or $41.3 billion, led by dynamic random access memory chips.
 
“The events behind the current chip shortage continue to impact original equipment manufacturers around the world,” said Andrew Norwood, Gartner’s research vice president, “but the 5G smartphone ramp up and a combination of strong demand and logistics/raw material price increases drove semiconductor average selling prices higher, contributing to significant revenue growth in 2021.”

BY KIM TAE-YUN, SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]
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