Revenue generated by the global semiconductor market grew by 21.6% to $420.4-billion in 2017, driven by strong growth in the memory market.
Suppliers for the top 25 semiconductor vendors experienced significant growth as two key markets – industrial and automotive – continued to achieve double-digit growth, buoyed by broad-based growth across most other end markets.
The nonmemory segment’s revenue grew by 9.3% to $290-billion in 2017, market research multinational Gartner research director George Brocklehurst said on Monday.
“Growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) is having a significant impact on the semiconductor market, with application-specific standard products (ASSPs) for consumer applications up by 14.3% and industrial ASSPs rising by 19.1% in 2017.”
Semiconductors for wireless connectivity showed the highest growth of 19.3% in 2017, and topped $10-billion for the first time, despite reduced component prices and the static smartphone industry, he highlighted.
“The booming memory segment overshadowed strong growth in other categories in 2017.”
The combined revenue of the top ten semiconductor vendors increased by 30.6% during 2017 and accounted for 58% of the total market, outperforming the rest of the market, which achieved an 11% increase in revenue.
Global chip manufacturer Intel, the largest seminconductor vendor by revenue for the previous 25 years, became the second-largest vendor behind Samsung Electronics, as an undersupply drove pricing for dynamic random-access memory and nonvolatile NAND flash systems higher.
“The memory market surged by nearly $50-billion to reach $130-billion in 2017, a 61.8% increase from 2016. Samsung's memory revenue alone increased nearly $20-billion in 2017, moving the company into the top spot,” he highlighted.
However, Gartner predicts that the company's lead will be short-lived and will disappear when the memory market goes into its bust cycle, most likely in late 2019.