Semiconductor revenue grew 12.5% in 2018: Gartner

Mumbai, April 12 (IANS) Global semiconductor revenue totalled $474.6 billion in 2018, a 12.5 per cent increase from 2017, a report by Gartner Inc. said on Friday.

"Despite slowing growth, the memory market is still the largest semiconductor market, accounting for 34.3 per cent of revenue," Andrew Norwood, Research Vice President at Gartner, said in a statement.

Samsung Electronics increased its lead as the no. 1 semiconductor vendor due to the booming dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) market. Currently, 88 per cent of the company's revenue comes from memory sales.

"This was driven by increases in average selling prices (ASPs) for DRAM for the majority of 2018. However, ASPs began to decline in the fourth quarter and this will continue through most of 2019 due to oversupply conditions," Norwood added.

Intel's semiconductor revenue grew by 12.9 per cent compared with 2017, despite delays in the introduction of 10nm manufacturing process and a constrained low-end CPU supply situation in the second half of 2018.

SK hynix experienced the strongest growth among the top 10 worldwide semiconductor vendors with a 37.4 per cent increase in 2018.

The second-largest category, which is application-specific standard products (ASSPs), saw a growth of only 5.1 per cent due to a stalling smartphone market combined with a tablet market that continues to decline.

Vendors that rely heavily on these end markets to sell application processors, modems and other components in many cases saw semiconductor revenue decline.