Despite Low Fourth Quarter Intel Keeps Its Global Chip Crown

Santa Clara, California-based Intel managed to keep its crown as the world's biggest chip maker in 2008, according to the latest market reports from iSuppli, which also puts AMD, Intel's archrival on the microprocessor market, outside the top 10 worldwide chip makers. According to the same source, only a handful of chip manufacturers managed to boost their revenues in 2008, including companies such as STMicroelectronics, Qualcomm, NEC, Broadcom, Panasonic, Sharp, Rohm, Marvell Technology, MediaTek and Fujitsu. Other names in the industry, such as Hynix, NXP, Samsung and Renesas, recorded the biggest revenue declines.

 “It’s not always good to be the king, as shown by the results of most of the top semiconductor suppliers in 2008,” said Dale Ford, senior vice president, market intelligence services, for iSuppli. “Many of these suppliers are focused on semiconductor segments that performed poorly during the year, including memory, Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), analog Integrated Circuits (ICs) and standard logic. This caused 80% of the Top 10 and 60% of the Top 25 semiconductor suppliers to experience declining revenues compared to 2007.”
 

Intel's share of the global chip industry was at 13.1% with a year-over-year drop in revenue to $33.8 billion. Sunnyvale, California-based AMD, however, was the only chip maker to have lost its position in last year's top 10, compared to the results in 2007. The chip maker's revenue went down 7.8 percent to $5.46 billion, with the company falling to the 12th place globally, down from the 10th place a year earlier.

Texas Instruments' place was taken over by Toshiba, which landed in the third spot, while the former became the world's fourth chip maker. Qualcomm jumped to the 8th place from the 13th a year earlier, as the company expanded its share of the mobile phone chip sector. This was also one of the reasons for the decline of Texas Instruments.
 

According to iSuppli, the overall market was down 21.5% in the fourth quarter, more than double the estimations of the research company, back in November last year.