IC Insights: MediaTek and AMD will squeeze into the top 15 semiconductor suppliers in 2020

IC Insights forecasts the top 15 semiconductor suppliers in 2020 (Figure 1). Among them, seven of the top 15 semiconductor suppliers are expected to achieve ≥ 22% growth this year, while Nvidia is expected to achieve a huge growth of 50%.

figure 1

According to IC Insights' forecast, the top 15 semiconductor suppliers in 2020 will include eight companies headquartered in the United States, two each headquartered in South Korea, Taiwan, China and Europe, and one in Japan.

The semiconductor industry has been one of the most resilient markets in a year plagued by the coronavirus. Despite causing a severe global recession in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has spurred an acceleration of digital transformation around the world, leading to strong growth in the semiconductor market. Overall, sales of the top 15 semiconductor companies are expected to increase by 13% in 2020 compared to 2019, slightly more than double the total expected growth of 6% for the global semiconductor industry. In contrast, in 2019, the total sales of the top 15 semiconductor suppliers fell by 15%. In 2020, all top 15 companies are expected to have semiconductor sales of at least $9.5 billion.

In addition, IC Insights also predicts that there will be two new entrants in the top 15 semiconductor manufacturers this year: MediaTek and AMD, whose sales are expected to grow strongly by 35% and 41%, respectively. As shown in the figure, MediaTek is expected to jump 5 places to 11th this year, while AMD is expected to jump 3 places to 15th.

Apple is an outlier in the top 15 of major semiconductor suppliers. The company designs and uses its processors and other custom ICs only in its own products and does not sell its ICs to other system manufacturers. IC Insights believes that by 2020, the "sales value" of Apple's custom ICs will reach $10.04 billion, which would rank it 13th among the top 15.

The top 15 companies include pure-play foundry TSMC, which is expected to post a strong revenue growth of 31% in 2020/2019. TSMC's growth is mainly due to the 5nm and 7nm application processors sold by Apple and HiSilicon for their smartphones, respectively. If TSMC were excluded from the list, Sony (with an estimated semiconductor sales of $9.243 billion in 2020) would rank 15th.

IC Insights includes foundries in the top 15 semiconductor supplier rankings because it has always viewed the rankings as supplier rankings rather than market share rankings and is aware that in some cases semiconductor sales are double-counted.

Overall, the top 15 list shown in Figure 1 is intended as a guide to determine which companies are the leading semiconductor suppliers, regardless of whether they are IDMs, fabless companies, or foundries.