The ranking of the world's top ten IC design companies in 2018 is released

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According to the latest statistics from TrendForce, the revenue rankings of the world's top ten IC design companies in 2018 are released, with the top three being Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Nvidia.

Among the top ten, Qualcomm suffered the largest decline due to weak demand for smartphones, with its revenue falling 3.9% from the previous year; MediaTek was also affected by poor demand for smartphones, with its annual revenue declining by 0.7% in 2018 (calculated in US dollars). However, if calculated in New Taiwan dollars, the decline was only 0.1%.

Yao Jiayang, senior industry analyst at TrendForce, pointed out that although Qualcomm's product strategy in 2018 was quite positive, the loss of Apple's 2018 new phone LTE Modem order, coupled with the steady increase in the proportion of Huawei equipped with Kirin processors, caused Qualcomm's mobile phone chip shipments to decline, which also affected its revenue performance. On the other hand, MediaTek has significantly reduced its decline last year as it continued to adjust its product portfolio and cost structure.

Looking at the overall situation of the top ten IC design companies in 2018, eight of them achieved positive growth in annual revenue compared to 2017, due to stable growth momentum in terminal markets such as network infrastructure, data centers, and televisions, and secondly, revenue performance was improved through acquisitions. Companies that benefited from market growth momentum include Broadcom, NVIDIA, AMD, Xilinx, Novatek, and Realtek; and companies that benefited from acquisitions include Marvell and Dialog Semiconductor.

AMD's performance in 2018 was quite outstanding, with its growth rate second only to Nvidia. The main reason was that AMD's computing and graphics computing product lines performed well, with revenue reaching US$4.13 billion and a growth rate of 38.6%. This was thanks to AMD's successive adoption of 7nm process in its processors and graphics processors, which helped it enter the server market.

However, it must be noted that in the fourth quarter of 2018, the performance of many companies was lower than the original market expectations, including NVIDIA, Marvell and Dialog Semiconductor, which all lowered their financial forecasts in the latest quarterly financial reports. Take NVIDIA as an example. Since games account for more than 50% of the company's revenue, the company's game revenue in the latest quarter fell sharply, making the overall revenue performance in 2018 lower than the outside world's expectations. This also shows that NVIDIA's game graphics card inventory has not been completely sold out. It may take one to two quarters of inventory to sell out before it has a chance to resume normal operating performance. But in terms of growth rate, it still ranks first among the top ten IC design companies.

Looking ahead to 2019, Yao Jiayang said that the growth performance of the world's top ten IC design companies will be affected by many external factors, such as the continued decline in the growth rate of smartphones. In addition, this year, both 5G and foldable smartphones will remain limited topics, and the actual shipments and penetration rates will still be quite limited. Huawei's attitude in the smartphone market is still quite positive, which will inevitably compress the market performance of other OEMs, and will be an unfavorable factor for Qualcomm and MediaTek's market performance in 2019.

The growth performance of servers is expected to be lower than that of 2018. The main reason is that the data centers of major CSP companies have been built one after another, and the demand for servers will gradually slow down. In addition, the demand of the global automobile market may continue to be suppressed. Therefore, we are more conservative about the revenue performance of the top ten IC design companies in 2019.

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