The worldwide semiconductor market grew by 10% to $55,800m, Dataquest reckons, with the best performance put in by the Koreans, Taiwanese and others in South-East Asia: their share of the worldwide market doubled to 4%, the research outfit reckons, the gain coming mainly from memory chips. MOS growth was 19%, but bipolar technologies declined 11% as performance of CMOS parts improved and the hybrid BiCMOS technology began to make its presence felt.
Top 20 Manufacturers Company 89 rank 88 88 Sales 89 % +/- Share
NEC 1 1 $4,543m $4,964m 9 8.9 Toshiba 2 2 $4,395m $4,889m 11 8.8 Hitachi 3 3 $3,506m $3,930m 12 7.0 Motorola 4 4 $3,035m $3,322m 9 5.9 Fujitsu 5 6 $2,607m $2,941m 13 5.3 Texas 6 5 $2,741m $2,787m 2 5.0 Mitsubishi 7 8 $2,312m $2,629m 14 4.7 Intel 8 7 $2,350m $2,440m 4 4.4 Matsushita 9 9 $1,883m $1,871m (1) 3.4 Philips 10 10 $1,738m $1,690m (3) 3.0 NatSemi 11 11 $1,650m $1,618m (2) 2.9 SGS-Thomson 12 12 $1,087m $1,301m 20 2.3 Samsung 13 18 $905m $1,284m 42 2.3 Sharp 14 15 $1,036m $1,230m 19 2.2 Siemens 15 20 $784m $1,194m 52 2.1 Sanyo 16 14 $1,083m $1,132m 5 2.0 Oki 17 17 $947m $1,125m 19 2.0 AMD 18 13 $1,084m $1,082m 0 1.9 Sony 19 16 $950m $1,077m 13 1.9 AT&T 20 19 $859m $873m 2 1.6
Japanese companies maintained a 51% share of the market, European companies retained 10% and the South-East Asian firms grew at the expense of the US, whose share fell to 35% from 37%. The survey, which covered 120 semiconductor companies, found that Japanese grew their market share in North America to 24% from 21% in 1988, while in the opposite direction, North American companies remained stuck at 10%. NEC Corp is still the number one semiconductor supplier worldwide with almost $5,000m of business, but Toshiba Corp took over the top spot in MOS memory chips, fuelling it to within a whisker of NEC’s total at $4,900m. Siemens AG, at 15, up from 20 in 1988, Samsung Electronic Corp, at 13, up from 18, and SGS-Thomson Microelectronics BV, static at number 12, were the fastest growing companies, climbing 52%, 42% and 20% respectively.
