14 DAY TRIAL // International Data Corporation (IDC) has made public its latest Worldwide Semiconductor Applications Forecaster (SAF) today. The company’s market analysis shows that the entire semiconductor market grew a modest 3.7 percent in the last year.
This 3.7% may seem small and it really is a modest growth, but considering that the semiconductor market is worth over 300 billion dollars annually, it’s a consistent eleven billion dollar growth.
It seems the industry has overcome the general economic downturn and the many uncertainties in the United States and the European Union, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, China's slowdown in the last part of the year, and the Thailand floods.
There were many new applications that have grown in popularity, such as smartphones, media and computing/productive tablets, classic and multimedia e-readers, automotive automation and increased connectivity and multimedia, solid increase in notebook PCs sales, datacenter servers along with wireless and wired communication infrastructure that drove a considerable growing need of modern semiconductors.
IDC's SAF is monitoring and assessing the activity and results of more than one hundred semiconductor companies. Of these, over 40 experienced yearly revenue growth greater than 5%, while just about the same number of companies saw their revenue decline by more than 5%.
Intel was the general market leader with revenues of around $52 billion in 2011, followed by Korea’s Samsung with revenues of around $29 billion.
The top two were followed by Texas Instruments, Toshiba, and Renesas Electronics and Qualcomm, Hynix, STMicro, Micron, and Broadcom in the lower half of the top ten. These top ten companies totaled 53% of the global semiconductor revenues.
That’s an increase of 3% over 2010.
The top 25 vendors accounted for 72% of overall semiconductor revenues for the year of 2011.
There were a significant number of mergers and acquisitions in the last year, most notably Qualcomm that bought Atheros, Texas Instruments’ National Semiconductor deal, SMSC’s Conexant deal and Broadcom/NetLogic along with others.
Apple is the company that was surprising as usual, just as they’ve had an impressive 140% yearly semiconductor growth in revenue.
But, like we’ve reported before, major industry players don’t think that 2012 will enjoy the same growth rate.