Gartner: chip market grew by 25 percent last year to 515 billion euros

According to analyst firm Gartner, the chip market grew by 25.1 percent in 2021 and was worth 583.5 billion dollars. Samsung has taken over the top spot from Intel, for the first time since 2018. That would be due to the strong growth of sales from memory chips.

Samsung, Intel and SK Hynix are the top three companies that generated the most revenue from chips in 2021, Gartner reports. The numbers one and two have switched places compared to last year. MediaTek moves up slightly, from eighth to seventh. Nvidia also moved up one position, to ninth place. AMD is now in tenth place, last year it was fourteenth.

The largest percentage growth can be seen at AMD and MediaTek. Revenue growth was 64.4 percent at AMD. MediaTek, which has been the market leader in smartphone OCS since last year, achieved growth of 58.8 percent. Intel’s growth was the lowest of the top 25 at 0.5 percent, Gartner said.

According to Gartner, the global chip market grew mainly due to the construction of new data centers worldwide, and memory production was the best-performing category within the chip industry. The total chip market grew by $117 billion, of which 42 billion is attributable to memory chips. Intel sold its nand memory division to SK Hynix at the end of 2020.

Within the memory category, dram was the best performing segment, with sales growth of more than 40 percent compared to a year earlier. In 2021, $92.5 billion in dram was sold. Gartner attributes that to strong demand for dram in servers and PCs. As a result, shortages arose and prices rose. In particular, the new DDR5 memory is currently very expensive.

The rise of 5G smartphones also contributed to the growth of the chip market. According to Gartner, about 555 million smartphones with 5G were made by 2021. A year earlier, there were 250 million. Due to the restrictions imposed on Huawei by the United States, other Chinese chipmakers such as MediaTek and Skyworks were able to grow, Gartner said. HiSilicon, the division of Huawei that makes chips, only reached $1 billion in revenue in 2021, compared to $8.2 billion a year earlier.

Other analysts also cite comparable growth rates for the total chip market. IC Insights, for example, talks about a growth of 26 percent in 2021. This year IC Insights expects a growth of 11 percent.

Gartner’s overview consists of companies that design and sell chips themselves. The analyst firm does not include chip manufacturers that produce on behalf of others, such as TSMC. IC Insights does include fabs such as TSMC in its overview. In December, IC Insights estimated that TSMC would be in third place in 2021, with revenues of $56.6 billion.