The South Koreans have replaced Intel as the largest chip manufacturer in the world.
(Photo: dpa)
Munich The factories are working at full capacity, the order books are full to the brim: the chip industry achieved record sales last year. According to the market researchers at Gartner, almost all major manufacturers have benefited from the tremendous upswing. Only one not: industry leader Intel. According to the experts, the turnover of the US group increased by only half a percent.
The world’s largest chip producer is now by far the electronics group Samsung. While the South Koreans led the semiconductor industry once before in 2017 and 2018, Intel has otherwise led the industry since the mid-1990s. The US group only benefits comparatively little from the recent boom.
The revenue of the chip industry rose last year by a good quarter to 583.5 billion dollars (513 billion euros). “As the global economy recovered in 2021, bottlenecks emerged throughout the semiconductor supply chain, particularly in the automotive industry,” says Gartner analyst Andrew Norwood. Manufacturers used this to raise prices.
The proceeds of the entire chip division of the tech conglomerate Samsung climbed by almost a third to around 76 billion dollars. In 2021, the Korean company achieved around three billion dollars more sales than Intel in this area.
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The changing of the guard has two reasons. On the one hand, the booming business with memory modules is helping. Sales in this chip category climbed a good third last year, the biggest increase of any industry category. As the de facto world market leader in this area, Samsung is benefiting particularly from the boom.
Intel suffers from homegrown problems
In addition, Intel suffers from homegrown technical problems in its factories. So it happened that AMD massively took market share from the rival. The two companies from Silicon Valley dominate the business with processors for PCs, notebooks and servers. Processors are the brains of every computer.
AMD has thus become the fastest growing company among the ten leading chip manufacturers. According to Gartner, the Californian’s sales increased by around two-thirds last year.
One prominent name is missing from the top ten: TSMC. That’s because the Taiwanese work as contract manufacturers and only supply to other chip manufacturers or electronics groups like Apple. With sales of around $57 billion, TSMC would be number three in the ranking.
The three leading European chip producers Infineon, ST Microelectronics and NXP did not make it into the top ten last year. In the fiscal year ending September 30, the Munich-based Dax group Infineon achieved around three billion euros less in sales than AMD, number ten worldwide.
The industry will probably not make a leap like last year in 2022. But things are still looking up: The market observers from World Semiconductor Trade Statistics expect sales to increase by almost nine percent.
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