Memory woes help Intel shine in global chip market
The market researcher reckons the total semiconductor market was down 11.7 percent year-on-year at $428.5 billion. This size of annual market contraction is in-line with figures from WSTS and Gartner (see Chip market tries to draw line under weak 2019 and Chip market declined 12% in 2019, says Gartner).
The 2019 memory chip revenue fell by 31.6 percent, with DRAM falling 37.2 percent and NAND flash memory dropping by 24.5 percent, according to Omdia.
Ranking of semiconductor vendors by 2019 revenue (millions of US dollars). Source: Omdia.
The drop in the overall chip market was greater than that of 2009 and it looks certain that it will be exceeded by 2020 due to the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The only company in the top ten ranking to grow revenue in 2019, besides Intel, was Broadcom ranked fifth. All the others in the ranking saw revenue fall. In the case of the Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron by 30 percent and more.
Intel, despite a difficult year supplying some customers with processors (see Intel apologies for another supply shortfall) was able to eke out 1.3 percent growth to overtake 2018’s market leader Samsung. ST was able to jump two places even with falling revenue and Infineon re-entered Omdia’s top ten vendor list.
Omdia labelled Intel’s performance as a triumph of a diversified business model. Intel achieved no growth in its core microprocessor business in 2019 but did grow in other segments. Its sales of logic chips rose 7.1 percent, Omdia said. Four out of five of Intel’s business divisions achieved growth and the Mobileye division, focused on autonomous driving increased sales 25.9 percent. There was more modest growth in the Data Center Group (2.1 percent) and the IoT Group (10.6 percent).
Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corp. came 13 in Omdia’s ranking and achieved stunning growth of 30.9 percent. Sony has long been the leader in CMOS image sensors and its extensive build of capacity in the middle of the decade has helped pay off as smartphone makers move towards multisensor, multicamera configurations.
Triple-camera smartphones became the most popular type of model on the market in the fourth quarter, exceeding dual-camera devices for the first time, according to Omdia. Models with three cameras accounted for 31 percent of global smartphone shipments during the final three months of 2019, exceeding the percentage of single-camera models. This helped drive a 22.9 percent increase for the global CMOS sensor market in 2019.
The wireless communications market fell by 13.3 percent in 2019 as consumers delayed phones purchases while waiting for 5G performance.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Chip market declined 12% in 2019, says Gartner
Chip market tries to draw line under weak 2019
Intel apologies for another supply shortfall
US entity list hit fabless chip vendors in 2019
Sony took half the CMOS image sensor market in 2018
Intel fail foreseen: ARM reportedly wins Mac computer processor design-ins
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