Date: 03/04/2012
The top ten semiconductor foundries in 2011: TSMC maintains lead
In year 2011 the total revenue of semiconductor foundries business, which is more called as semiconductor fab services is estimated as 29.8 Billion US$ by Gartner, a 0.7% growth in revenue compared to 2010. Semiconductor fab services revenues is approximately 10% of total semiconductor device revenue. The reasons for less growth given by Gartner includes 'Japanese disaster' and 'Thailand flooding'. Even though the chip market was hit by naturals disasters the demand for mobile phones and tablet computers have helped to keep the growth.
There were media reports early this year about yield issues in 28nm. That is not looks to be true as per the experts. The 28nm is becoming the diffrentiator for fabs such as TSMC and Globalfoundries. TSMC has expanded its revenue over 2010 to have 48.8 % share in 2011, as per Gartner.
According to Gartner's latest study the top five foundries accounted for 80% foundry market share. Here below is table listing top 10 companies' sales revenue from shipments of foundry wafers to the world, 2011 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)
2011 Rank
2010 Rank
Company
2010 Sales
2010 Market
Share (%)
2011 Sales
2011 Market Share (%)
Year-Over-Year Change (%)
1
1
TSMC
13,332
47.1
14,533
48.8
9.0
2
2
UMC
3,824
13.5
3,604
12.1
-5.8
3
3
GlobalFoundries
3,520
12.4
3,580
12.0
1.7
4
4
SMIC
1,554
5.5
1,319
4.4
-15.1
5
6
TowerJazz
509
1.8
613
2.1
20.4
6
8
IBM Microelectronics
500
1.8
545
1.8
9.0
7
7
Vanguard International
505
1.8
516
1.7
2.2
8
5
Dongbu HiTek
512
1.8
483
1.6
-5.7
9
10
Samsungš
390
1.4
470
1.6
20.5
10
19
Powerchip Technology
149
0.5
431
1.4
189.3
Top 10 for 2011
24,795
87.6
26,094
87.7
5.2
Others
3,510
12.4
3,660
12.3
4.3
Total Market
28,305
100.0
29,754
100.0
5.1
Samsung revenue does not include ASIC business from Apple
Source: Gartner (March 2012)
The major vendor shakeups as per Gartner includes:
Samsung's foundry, with $470 million in revenue, ranked No. 9. However, Samsung Electronics had been very aggressively expanding its LSI business in 2011. Had the estimated $1 billion Apple wafer business been included in its foundry revenue, Samsung would rank as high as No. 4 in the foundry ranking, as per Gartner.
Powerchip had a nearly threefold increase in foundry revenue in one year due to the strategic decision to shift from the commodity DRAM business to foundry in early 2011.
Communications, consumer and data processing application ICs accounted for 42.7 percent, 20.9 percent and 20.3 percent of the foundry revenue, respectively, in 2011. Fables IC companies contributed 77.8 percent of the foundry business. Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDMs) who are using fablite model contributed 20.2 percent, and the remaining came from system companies, as per Gartner. America's customers topped by generating 62.8 percent of the foundry revenue, Asia/Pacific 22.2 percent, Europe 10 percent and Japan 4.9 percent.
Samuel Tuan Wang, research director at Gartner says: the annual average utilization rate of fabs to drop to 81 percent in 2011 from 91 percent in 2010.
Do you wish to know top semiconductor foundries ranking in 2009, please visit:
http://www.eeherald.com/section/news/nw100010277.html