No. 1 semiconductor manufacturer Samsung gets way ahead of Intel

Claiming to be the world’s No.1 semiconductor fabricator in sales last year, Samsung Electronics increased its market share in the second quarter of the year to widen the gap from the chaser Intel.

On Sunday, market research firm Omdia reported that the South Korean semiconductor producer recorded 20.3 billion U.S. dollars in this year’s second quarter to account for 12.8 percent of the global market, worth 158.1 billion dollars. Rising from 12.5 percent in the previous quarter by 0.3 percentage points, Samsung’s Q2 sales turned out to be the largest quarterly figure it has ever recorded. This impressive increase in its sales is attributable to rising demand for servers and its business expansion in system semiconductors.

By contrast, Intel suffered a loss in the global market due to the slowed increase of demand for PCs and supply chain disruptions. It saw 14.8 billion dollars in sales in the second quarter, down by 16.6 percent on a quarter-on-quarter basis, while its market share decreased from 11.1 to 9.4 percent during the same period. The contrasting Q2 report cards of the world’s top two semiconductor firms widened their gap in market share from 1.4 to 3.4 percentage points.

Samsung and Intel have been running neck and neck to make the highest sales in the world. After Samsung surpassed its competitor in 2017 for the first time, Intel reclaimed the top spot in 2019 and secured its place until Samsung came back to beat it up last year, thanks to the boom in the global memory semiconductor market.

SK hynix in the second quarter recorded the third highest market share of 6.8 percent in the world, up by 0.6 percentage points on a quarterly basis, followed by Qualcomm (5.9 percent), Micron (5.2 percent), Broadcom (4.2 percent), AMD (4.1 percent), and NVIDIA (3.6 percent).


beepark@donga.com