Intel (United States) and Samsung (South Korea) ranked as the largest companies by semiconductor sales in the world in mid-2020, according to an analysis by the European Parliament.

Then they followed, in descending order: TSMC (Taiwan), SK Hynix (South Korea), Micron (United States), Broadcom (United States), Qualcomm (United States), Nvidia (United States), Texas Instruments (United States) and HiSilicon (China), owned from Huawei.

Business models in the semiconductor industry can be broadly divided into:

• Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDM), companies that integrate the entire value chain into their business model.
• “Fabless” (no-factory) companies that do not produce their own chips, but instead focus on design, IP licensing, and outsource production to outside factories or foundries.
• Pure-play companies (no physical store), which are the flip side of Fabless companies and often produce semiconductors to order.

The United States is the market leader in IDM and Fabless, and US-based companies have a sales market share of 51 and 65 percent.

Notable market leaders include Intel, Micron (IDM), and Nvidia and Qualcomm (Fabless).

South Korea’s MDIs (eg Samsung, SK Hynix) follow second with a 29 percent market share.

Europe has a share of the IDM market, but only with a modest global market share of 9 percent.

Semiconductors

According to the analysis, semiconductor production has been increasingly relocated to Asia for decades.

Asia had around 70% of global wafer manufacturing capacity in 2017, with North America and Europe lagging behind with 13 and 6%, respectively.

In addition to lower production costs in East Asian countries, increasing production and demand for consumer goods in this region also accelerated the relocation of semiconductor production to this region.

Semiconductor Sales: Leading Companies

With increasing demand, not only production has shifted to East Asia, but global semiconductor sales in general as well.

In recent years, the majority of revenue has been generated in China (> 30% market share since 2016), followed by other Asia-Pacific countries (excluding China and Japan, with> 20 percent).

America, Europe and Japan register market shares of around 20%, 10 and 9%, respectively.