The global pandemic has, as we know, led to a consumer electronics demand and the ICT sector in general that it was in 2020 and 2021 well above what could initially be expected. Easy then to predict how too demand for semiconductors in general has increased significantly over this period of time: Gartner certifies itlisting 2021 as the first year in which semiconductor sales exceeded $500 billion in equivalent value.
The data, still preliminary, for 2021 speaks of a total revenue of US$583.5 billionin growth of 25.1% compared to 2020. In addition, last year was a difficult period for semiconductor production, with market demand far exceeding production capacity, which caused many production problems in certain sectors.
It is enough to think both of the computer world in the strict sense to understand the difficulty in sourcing the components needed to build the productsthen put up for sale. The problems in the automotive sector are even clearer, with almost all manufacturers unable to meet customer demand due to the reduced number of chips available to them to complete the construction of cars.
Among the different types of semiconductors to still dominate memorieswith demand driven by the installation of cloud servers in ever larger and more complex data centers necessary, among other things, to also meet the changing needs of remote work and study.
Samsung has returned to the top rank of world producers with a market share of 13% in 2021; follows her closely information, in first place in 2020, with 12.5% of the total. While Intel indeed achieved an annual result almost unchanged compared to 2020, Samsung’s behavior was different, able to increase its turnover by more than 30% over the reference period.
SK Hynix finished third with 6.2% while Micron it ranks fourth with 4.9%. Then we find Qualcomm, largecom, Mediatek, Texas Instruments And Nvidia with shares ranging from 4.6% to 2.9% while closing the top 10 AMD with 2.7%: it is the latter, with NVIDIA, that which recorded the highest growth rate from 2020 to 2021 with more than 64% increase in turnover.