Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) was the fourth largest integrated circuit supplier in the world in the first half of 2018, according to market information advisory firm IC Insights.
A research paper by IC Insights on the world’s top semiconductor suppliers for the six month period showed TSMC’s sales at US$16.31 billion in the first half of the year, a 12 percent increase from a year earlier.
TSMC was one of only two Taiwanese firms to be included in the top-15 rankings of global IC companies but its position this year was one notch below its third-place ranking in 2017, according to the paper.
The other Taiwanese company was IC designer MediaTek Inc., which was ranked 15th in the first half of the 2018 with sales of US$3.73 billion, the same as a year earlier.
Among the top 15 IC suppliers on the list, seven are headquartered in the United States, three in Europe, two each in South Korean and Taiwan, and one in Japan.
The top-ranked company was South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. with US$39.79 billion in sales, up 36 percent from a year earlier.
U.S.-based IC giant Intel Corp. was second, registering US$32.59 billion in sales for the first half of the year, up 13 percent from a year earlier.
In third place was South Korean DRAM maker SK Hynix Inc., which posted US$17.75 billion in sales, up 56 percent from a year earlier, the research paper showed.
Rounding out the top 10 were American companies Micron Technology Inc. with sales of US$15.41 billion over the six-month period, Broadcom Ltd. (US$9.14 billion), and Qualcomm Inc. (US$7.98 billion), Toshiba Corp./Toshiba Memory of Japan (US$7.72 billion), and Texas Instruments Inc. (US$7.35 billion) and NVidia Inc. (US$6.24 billion) of the U.S.
IC Insights said that if TSMC, the world’s largest contact chip maker and a pure-play foundry operator, were excluded from the top 15 rankings, Apple Inc. would have edged into the top 15.
(By Frances Huang)