Samsung drives IDM win over fabless in 2015
It is being driven by Samsung’s decision to use its own Exynos application processor at the expense of Qualcomm.
However, 2015 will be a flattish year (see Analog, US to lead chip market growth). While sales of top 10 IDMs are forecast to be flat in aggregate, the top 10 fabless companies expected to slip into negative growth this year.
The only other time that IDM sales growth (35 percent) beat that of the fabless chip companies (29 percent) was in 2010 when the industry was recovering from an extreme slump in 2009.
In order to make direct comparisons for year-over-year growth, IC Insights combined the merged, or soon to be merged, companies’ 2014 and 2015 semiconductor sales regardless of when the merger occurred.
The decline in Qualcomm/CSR sales is responsible for much of the change in fortunes as it is driven by Samsung’s increasing use of its internally developed Exynos application processor in its smartphones rather than Snapdragon processors supplied by Qualcomm. In other words fabless chip sales have been converted into IDM chip sales.
Application processor sales to fabless/system house Apple from pure-play foundry TSMC are included in the fabless company sales ranking under the “Apple/TSMC” moniker. Application processor sales supplied to Apple from IDM-foundry Samsung are included as part of Samsung’s IDM sales.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Analog, US to lead chip market growth
Samsung on Intel’s heels in chip vendor ranking
Pure-play foundry sales to bounce back, says IC Insights
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