Global research and advisory firm Garner reported April 11 that worldwide semiconductor sales totaled $474.6 billion in 2018, which is up 12.5% from 2017. And while it is was strong growth, it was notably weaker than 2017's rate of 21.9%, which Gartner attributes primarily to a slowdown in memory growth, expanding 24.9% in 2018 compared to 61.8% in 2017.
“Despite slowing growth, the memory market was still the largest semiconductor market, accounting for 34.3%of revenue,” said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner. “This was driven by increases in average selling prices (ASPs) for DRAM for the majority of 2018. However, ASPs began to decline in the fourth quarter and this will continue through most of 2019 due to oversupply conditions.”
Gartner's data showed that Samsung Electronics retained its spot atop among semiconductor vendors by revenue with a whopping $73.649 billion in 2018 sales. Gartner notes that 88% of that figure is from memory sales. Samsung's semiconductor sales grew 20.4% in 2018 compared to 2017, and Gartner said the company has 15.5% of the total semiconductor market share.
“Samsung’s lead is literally built on sand, in the form of memory silicon, and those shifting sands in 2019 will almost certainly lead to Samsung losing its No. 1 semiconductor crown to Intel in 2019,” Norwood said in Gartner's press release.
Intel was second in semiconductor sales at $66.29 billion, up 12.9% year-to-year, and Gartner said it has 14.0% of the total market share. Gartner noted that Intel's solid growth was despite delays in the introduction of 10 nm manufacturing process and a constrained low-end CPU supply situation in the second half of the year. SK hynix was a distant third with $36.24 billion in 2018 semiconductor sales—up 37.4% and with 7.5% of market share, while Micron Technology ($29.742 billion) and Broadcom ($15.261 billion) rounded out the top 5.
See Gartner's table below showing 2018's top 10 semiconductor vendors by volume, along with their year-to-year growth and market share.
According to Gartner, the second-largest semiconductor product category—application-specific standard products (ASSPs)—had 2018 growth of only 5.1%, attributed mainly to a stalling smartphone market, combined with a continuously declining tablet market.
Vendors that rely heavily on these end markets to sell application processors, modems, and other components—in many cases—saw semiconductor revenue decline," Gartner said. "Leading vendors in these areas, including Qualcomm and MediaTek, are aggressively expanding into adjacent markets with stronger prospects for growth, including automotive and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, similar to the maturation of the PC market, a mature smartphone market is likely to continue to be a headwind in 2019 for companies with high exposure."
