MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest 5G chip supplier, saw its ranking rise by one notch to No. 7 last year among world semiconductor vendors, as it benefited from the rapid 5G smartphone uptake in China after Huawei Technologies Co (華為) was forced to exit the market, Gartner Inc said in a report yesterday.
MediaTek’s revenue soared 58.8 percent to US$17.45 billion last year from US$10.99 billion in 2020, outpacing the global semiconductor industry’s growth of 25 percent, according to Gartner’s tally. That gave MediaTek a 3 percent market share.
The Hsinchu-based chip company ranked No. 8 in 2020, behind Texas Instruments Inc.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“US sanctions on Huawei resulted in other Chinese smartphone original electronic manufacturers gaining share and fueling growth for 5G chipset vendors such as Qualcomm Inc, MediaTek and Skyworks Solutions Inc,” Gartner said.
HiSilicon Technologies Co (海思), Huawei’s chip designing subsidiary, saw its revenue decline from US$8.2 billion in 2020 to about US$1 billion last year, Gartner’s tallies showed.
Qualcomm ranked No. 5 last year, unchanged from the previous year. The San Diego, California-based company saw revenue jump 52.3 percent to US$26.86 billion last year from US$17.63 billion in 2020.
The 5G smartphone market was one of the major factors driving the world semiconductor industry’s revenue last year to US$583.5 billion, with production more than doubling to 555 million units last year from 250 million units in 2020, Gartner said.
“As the global economy bounced back in 2021, shortages appeared throughout the semiconductor supply chain, particularly in the automotive industry,” Gartner research vice president Andrew Norwood said.
“The resulting combination of strong demand, as well as logistics and raw material price increases, drove semiconductors’ average selling price higher, contributing to overall revenue growth in 2021,” he said.
Samsung Electronics Co grabbed the top spot for the first time since 2018, with revenue increasing 31.6 percent to US$75.95 billion last year.
Samsung’s memorychip revenue expanded 34.2 percent last year, in line with the growth rate of the overall memorychip market, Gartner said.
Intel Corp dropped to No. 2, with 0.5 percent growth in revenue last year to US$73.1 billion, delivering the lowest growth rate among the world’s top 25 semiconductor vendors.
Memorychip maker SK Hynix Inc came in next with revenue of US$36.33 billion last year, up 40.5 percent from a year ago.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
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