NXP holds pole position in automotive semiconductor ranking

Market news | March 24, 2017

By Christoph Hammerschmidt

Semicast’s OE automotive semiconductor vendor share analysis ranks NXP as the leading supplier in 2016, with an estimated market share of 14.0%. NXP continues to hold the lead over Infineon Technologies, the second largest vendor, which in 2016 had an estimated market share of 10.7%. Renesas Electronics is judged to have been the third largest supplier of semiconductors to the OE automotive sector in 2016, with a market share of 9.6%, ahead of STMicroelectronics on 7.6% and Texas Instruments on 6.9%. Robert Bosch was the only other vendor with an estimated market share of five percent or more in this sector in 2016, holding an estimated 5.9%.

NXP continues to lead the pack in the automotive chip business.
Next year, the pole position will likely be held by Qualcomm

With few changes in the vendor share ranking in 2016 over 2015, attention turns to the future of market leader NXP. Having merged with Freescale, thus creating the largest vendor of OE automotive semiconductors, NXP has experienced two important events over the last twelve months. First, in June 2016, NXP announced it was to divest its Standard Products division into a stand-alone company called Nexperia.

With total 2016 sales of about USD 1.2 billion and product lines including discretes, logic and MOSFETs, Semicast judges automotive to be Nexperia’s largest market and the divestiture closed February 2017. Second, it was announced in October 2016 that Qualcomm is to acquire NXP, in a deal valued at USD 47 billion, to increase its presence in the automotive sector.

Almost all chip vendors in the top ten recorded a growing market share with the only exceptions being ON Semiconductor whose market share remained constant and Microchip whose share declined slightly. The growth of these large companies, logically was at the expense of all the smaller chip vendors subsumed under “Others” which shrank to 32,9 % in 2016 from 36.6 % a year ago.

Colin Barnden, Principal Analyst at Semicast Research commented “Semicast judges the net effect of these two transactions would be to create a combined ‘Qualcomm+NXP’ placed at the head of the automotive vendor share rankings, with a market share of about 13% in 2016 and comfortably clear of Infineon. Change is becoming a constant for the market leader in automotive.”