Chinese firms rise in top ten chip buyers’ ranking
Huawei continued its fall in the ranks of the world’s top ten chip buyers but other Chinese all gained market share, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.
Huawei has seen its chip purchasing fall from $24.9 billion in 2019, to $22.7 billion in 2020 and then by a further 32.3 percent to $15.4 billion in 2021, mainly due to it being place on an entity list by the US government. Huawei dropped from third ranked in 2020 (see Huawei hurting in top ten chip buyer ranking of 2020) to seventh in 2021.
In 2018 Huawei bought 4.4 percent of global chip output and this has declined to 2.6 percent in 2021, the market research firm estimates.
But other Chinese companies were able to keep on buying. Lenovo spent a third more to go third in the ranking. BBK Electronics – a maker of television sets, MP3 players, digital cameras and smartphones – increased spending by 63.8 percent and went fourth.
Top tenc ompanies by semiconductor design tota addressable market worldwide, 2021 (Millions of US Dollars). Source: Gartner Inc.
Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone maker, probably benefitted from Huawei’s discomfort and increased its spending by 68.2 percent and rose above Huawei in the ranking.
The top two chip buyers remain the smartphone and consumer electronic giants Apple and Samsung, with nearly 20 percent of the market between them.
Overal the top 10 OEMs increased their chip spending by 25.2 percent and accounted for 42.1 percent of the total market, according to preliminary results from Gartner.
One reason for the large increase in spending was, the semiconductor shortage and an associated increase in prices.
The average selling prices (ASPs) of semiconductor chips, such as microcontroller units, general-purpose logic integrated circuits (ICs), and a wide variety of application-specific semiconductors, increased by 15 percent or more in 2021. “The semiconductor shortage also accelerated OEMs’ double booking and panic buying, causing a huge spike in their semiconductor spending,” said Masatsune Yamaji, research director at Gartner, in a statement.
Apple increased its spending on memory by 36.8 percent and on non-memory chips by 20.2 percent in 2021. However, it decreased its demand for microprocessors due to the shift to using its in-house-designed application processors.
Samsung Electronics increased its memory spending by 34.1 percent and non-memory chip spending by 23.9 percent in 2021. The increase of memory spending was the result of not just a rise of memory price, but also Samsung’s growth in its target electronic equipment markets, especially the smartphone and solid-state drive (SSD) markets.
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