This article lists the top 10~25 largest semiconductor companies by sales leaders since 1987.
- The article ranks two types of semiconductor companies mixing them in one list:
- Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDM) such as chip makers from Intel, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics that design, manufacture and sell their chips.
- Fabless manufacturers such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA and AMD that design and sell chips but outsource manufacturing to foundry companies.
- You can find also a list of foundry companies such as TSMC and UMC that manufacture chips designed and sold by their customers especially from fabless companies as described before.
- Finally there's information about semiconductor equipment sales leaders describing IC equipment supplier's revenue which support all the semiconductor companies.
Gartner Dataquest Corp. has the longest history as the reference publisher of this ranking. Another sources of semiconductor sales market share have also become available by iSuppli Corporation starting from year 2000. Only corporate semiconductor revenues are taken into account and businesses activities outside this sphere are excluded, for example IBM non-semiconductor business lines are excluded.
In the majority of cases, rankings are based on the analysis of the financial reports of the chip makers, although definitional issues regarding chip types, multichip modules, foundry manufacturing and chip license revenues create differences in reported numbers. The ranking for a given year is published in March of the following year when all the financial reports of the companies are closed.
What is interesting about these revenue numbers is that they are nominal (without factoring in for inflation). Many companies' revenues in 2009 after inflation (~ 3%/year), would actually be lower than in 2000. This is an important point that may not bode well for employment in this sector (i.e. real revenue per employee is lower in 2009 compared to 2000).
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