China-based fabless chipmakers noticed their mixed share of the worldwide market attain 13% in 2018, up from solely 5% in 2010, in response to IC Insights.
Four of the top-5 quickest rising fabless IC firms (with higher than US$200 million in gross sales) final yr have been China-based firms – Bitmain, ISSI, Allwinner and HelloSilicon, IC Insights mentioned. However, when excluding the interior transfers of HelloSilicon (over 90% of its gross sales go to its mother or father firm Huawei), ZTE, and Datang, the Chinese share of the fabless firm IC gross sales drops by about half to 7%, IC Insights indicated.
The quickest rising fabless IC provider in 2018, at 197%, was Bitmain, IC Insights famous. It needs to be famous that labeling Bitmain an IC provider is a bit deceptive. Bitmain is an digital system provider of cryptocurrency mining gear. Since the corporate doesn’t promote particular person ICs on the open market, its IC gross sales are much like these IC Insights lists for Apple, with Bitmain’s IC gross sales basically being the worth of ICs it purchases from its sole-source foundry – TSMC.
With 68%, US firms continued to carry the dominant share of fabless IC gross sales in 2018, simply 1pp lower than in 2010, IC Insights mentioned.
European firms held solely 2% of the fabless IC firm market share in 2018 as in comparison with 4% in 2010, IC Insights mentioned. This lack of share was partly because of the acquisition of UK-based CSR by Qualcomm within the first quarter of 2015 and the acquisition of Germany-based Lantiq by Intel in second-quarter 2015. These acquisitions left UK-based Dialog and Norway-based Nordic as the one Europe-headquartered fabless IC suppliers in IC Insights’ 2018 top-50 fabless provider rating.
There was just one Japan-based agency – MegaChips – within the 2018 provider rating monitored by IC Insights. The lone South Korean firm – Silicon Works – had a 17% enhance in gross sales final yr to US$718 million.
Worldwide fabless IC gross sales elevated by US$8.three billion in 2018, which represented an 8% enhance from 2017, in response to IC Insights.
