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SAMSUNG Electronics and Apple remained the top semiconductor buyers in 2015, representing 17.7 percent of the market, claims Gartner.
The two companies together consumed US$59 billion worth of semiconductors in 2015, an increase of US$0.8 billion from 2014.
While this continues a five-year trend for the companies, Samsung did see a lower growth for its design total available market. Gartner warns that the risk of revenue declines from the strongest customers for semiconductor chip vendors is increasing, due to the slowing growth in the personal electronic device market.
Together, the top ten companies bought US$123 billion worth of semiconductors, accounting for 36.9 percent of semiconductor chip vendors’ worldwide revenues in 2015. This was down from 37.9 percent in 2014.
The decline in the market share taken by the top ten can be traced to various movements in the semiconductor market: HP spun off its enterprise business, bumping Toshiba from the top ten rankings, and this affected the figures by taking Toshiba’s share out.
Many semiconductor chip vendors, especially general-purpose chip vendors, are trying to reduce their dependency on a limited number of extremely large customers, says Gartner. Companies like Samsung Electronics, Apple and Lenovo are hoping to diversify their sales to cater to a larger number of small customers, so as to stabilise their business growth.
The cycle of an inflated boom and the obsolescence of electronic equipment are becoming faster, and it is also much more difficult for leading companies to maintain their position for a long time, Gartner warns. As such, current winners in the industry may not be the winners in the long term.