Qualcomm remains top in strong 2002 fabless market
By Peter Clarke
Semiconductor Business News
February 19, 2003 (2:03 p.m. EST)
commsdesign.com
SCOTTSDALE, Arizona --- Qualcomm Corp. only just retained
its number one position as the top ranked fabless supplier
of chips despite growing its revenue by 39% in 2002 to
$1.94 billion, according to IC Insights Inc., a market
research organization. Overall fabless IC sales grew 19% in
2002; ten times the rate of the chip market as a whole, the
company reckons.
Qualcomm's difficulties arose because second ranked
graphics processor vendor Nvidia Corp. managed to grow its
2002 revenue by 50% compared with 2001 and achieved sales
of $1.915 billion. Qualcomm, a supplier of chipsets for
CDMA mobile phones, registered fourth quarter 2002 chip
sales increase of 47%, from $484 million in 3Q02 to $710
million in 4Q02, to secure the number one spot.
Elsewhere MediaTek of Taiwan almost doubled its sales to
$854 million to leap up the list five places to number
five.
IC Insights considers a company fabless when it receives
the majority of its finished wafer supply from IC
foundries. In 2002, the top ten fabless companies
represented about 60% of the total worldwide IC sales from
fabless suppliers.
In 2002, there was no change in the ranking of the top
three fabless IC suppliers. But FPGA vendor Xilinx Inc.
hung on to its number three position with a 2% decline in
sales and Via Technologies Inc., a vendor of PC peripheral
chipsets and processors, saw sales decline 28% and dropped
to places to sixth.
Cirrus Logic Inc. ranked eighth in the top ten fabless IC
company listing in 2001, fell out of the top ten ranking to
thirteenth position in 2002 because the company1s sales
dropped to $304 million in 2002 from $534 million in 2001,
a decline of 43%.
Over the past five years, fabless IC sales results have
been much better than those registered in the overall IC
market, IC Insights observed. In 2002, the total top ten
fabless IC company growth rate was almost ten times the
growth rate of the worldwide IC market; 19% versus about
2%. IC Insights expects this trend to continue through at
least 2007.
Top ten fabless IC suppliers by revenue ($ millions)
2002 2001 Company Country 2001 2002 % change
1 1 Qualcomm U.S. 1,395 1,942 39%
2 2 NVidia U.S. 1,275 1,915 50%
3 3 Xilinx U.S. 1,149 1,125 -2%
4 5 Broadcom U.S. 962 1,083 13%
5 10 MediaTek Taiwan 447 854 91%
6 4 Via Tech Taiwan 1,009 729 -28%
7 6 Altera U.S. 839 712 -15%
8 9 ATI Tech Canada 480 645 34%
9 7 Conexant U.S. 646 627 -3%
10 13 SanDisk U.S. 317 493 56%
Top ten total 8,519 10,125 19%
Source: IC Insights Inc. February 2003 |
