TSMC continues to dominate the worldwide foundry market

2018-04-25 12:27:12

Research included in the recently released 50-page April Update to the 2018 edition of IC Insights� McClean Report shows that in 2017, the top eight major foundry leaders (i.e., sales of ?$1.0 billion) held 88% of the $62.3 billion worldwide foundry market (Figure 1). �The 2017 share was the same level as in 2016 and one point higher than the share the top eight foundries represented in 2015. �With the barriers to entry (e.g., fab costs, access to leading edge technology, etc.) into the foundry business being so high and rising, IC Insights expects this �major� marketshare figure to remain at or near this elevated level in the future.

TSMC, by far, was the leader with $32.2 billion in sales last year. �In fact, TSMC�s 2017 sales were over 5x that of second-ranked GlobalFoundries and more than 10x the sales of the fifth-ranked foundry SMIC.

Figure 1

China-based Huahong Group, which includes Huahong Grace and Shanghai Huali, displayed the highest growth rate of the major foundries last year with an 18% jump. �Overall, 2017 was a good year for many of the major foundries with four of the eight registering double-digit sales increases.

Of the eight major foundries, six of them are headquartered in the Asia-Pacific region. As shown, Samsung was the only IDM foundry in the ranking. �IBM, a former major IDM foundry, was acquired by GlobalFoundries in mid-2015 while IDM foundries Fujitsu and Intel fell short of the $1.0 billion sales threshold last year. Although growing only 4% last year, Samsung easily remained the largest IDM foundry in 2017, with over 5x the foundry sales of Fujitsu, the second-largest IDM foundry.