Samsung Electronics continues to slide.

According to the latest statistics released by market research firm Omdia, Samsung Electronics fell to third place in the global chip manufacturer revenue rankings in 2023. Reports indicate that the annual sales of Samsung Electronics' semiconductor (DS) division amounted to $44.374 billion, a decrease of 33.8% from the $67.055 billion in 2022. This decline caused Samsung's DS division to drop two places from first to third. This is attributed to the unprecedented downturn in the memory business, which has always been Samsung's cash cow. Omdia explained that Samsung Electronics' semiconductor product sales last year were half of the semiconductor boom period in 2021.

Intel's sales also decreased by 15.8% compared to the previous year, but it benefited from Samsung Electronics' poor performance and reclaimed the top sales position for the first time in two years.

The rankings of other traditional memory giants such as SK Hynix and Micron also declined. Last year, SK Hynix's sales fell 30.6% from $34.1 billion the year before to $23.68 billion, dropping from fourth to sixth place. Similarly, Micron Technology's sales plummeted by 25.1%, from $26.87 billion to $15.963 billion, falling from sixth to twelfth place.

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On the other hand, Nvidia, the world's largest GPU company, has seen its performance soar with artificial intelligence as a new growth engine. Last year, Nvidia achieved sales of $49.161 billion, a 133.6% increase from the previous year's $21.049 billion. Nvidia is the only company among the top 20 revenue-generating companies surveyed by Omdia to have more than doubled its sales.

Nvidia's sales ranking jumped to second place, surpassing Samsung Electronics, mainly due to the booming generative artificial intelligence market and the resulting surge in GPU demand. Nvidia has almost monopolized the global AI chip market, holding more than 90% of the market share.

Qualcomm and Broadcom ranked fourth and fifth in sales, with revenues of $30.913 billion and $28.427 billion, respectively.The income assessment this time does not include wafer foundries. TSMC announced a revenue of NT$216,173.6 billion, a decrease of 4.5% compared to the previous year's NT$226,389.1 billion.

Gartner's statistics differ

In January of this year, Gartner released the global semiconductor manufacturers' revenue ranking for 2023. Amidst the general pressure on the semiconductor industry in 2023, the total revenue of the Top 10 manufacturers declined.

The organization's preliminary statistics suggest that the total global semiconductor business revenue for 2023 was $533 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 11%. Among them, the overall revenue of the Top 25 manufacturers fell by 14.1% in 2023, accounting for 74.4% of the total market, a proportion lower than the 77.2% in 2022. Additionally, out of the top 25 manufacturers, only 9 saw revenue growth, while 10 experienced double-digit declines.

Comparing the revenue rankings from 2022, manufacturers with a focus on storage business generally faced revenue pressure. The rapid development of AI demand has propelled NVIDIA to enter the Top 5 for the first time. Furthermore, high demand in the automotive market has driven the growth of related companies, allowing STMicroelectronics to enter the Top 10.

According to Gartner's statistics, Samsung is the manufacturer with the largest year-on-year revenue growth decline (-37.5%) among the Top 10 globally by revenue, even surpassing SK Hynix (-32.1%).

SK Hynix's lower decline is partly due to its provision of HBM memory for NVIDIA's main AI chips, which also allowed SK Hynix's DRAM business to achieve growth far exceeding its peers (including Samsung) in several quarters of 2023.Due to the fact that HBM has always been a niche category compared to the overall memory market, even core suppliers like SK Hynix and Samsung are hard-pressed to compete with other non-memory semiconductor peers. These two manufacturers became the top 10 vendors with the largest year-on-year decline.

In 2023, the overall revenue from memory products decreased by 37%, especially in the first half of the year, where the three main markets for memory - smartphones, PCs, and servers - all faced challenges of demand falling below expectations and excess channel inventory. Looking at the categories, the revenue from DRAM products in 2023 fell by 38.5% to $48.4 billion, while the revenue from NAND flash memory fell by 37.5% to $36.2 billion.

Looking ahead to 2024, Gartner believes that the global memory market revenue will grow by 66.3%, with the NAND flash memory segment expected to see a year-on-year increase in revenue of 49.6% to $53 billion, and the DRAM memory segment is expected to grow by 88% to $87.4 billion.

Compared to memory manufacturers, non-memory manufacturers face a relatively mild environment. Gartner's statistics show that the overall revenue in this field declined by 3% in 2023, with AI applications being the core driving force in this part of the semiconductor market. The automotive market, especially the electric vehicle market, as well as the defense and aerospace market, performed better than other application areas.

From an enterprise perspective, the most growth-oriented company in many institutional rankings is NVIDIA. Benefiting from the strong demand for computational chips from generative AI, NVIDIA made a fortune in 2023, also driving the company to enter the top 5 semiconductor ranks in Gartner's statistics for the first time with a year-on-year revenue growth of 56.4%.

The second-highest revenue growth (+7.7%) is STMicroelectronics (ST), according to Gartner's statistics, which benefited from strong momentum in the automotive sector, allowing it to return to the eighth position in the industry in 2019.

The third revenue growth in the top 10 manufacturers (+7.2%) is Broadcom. Although Broadcom is generally considered a main supplier in the communication industry chain similar to Qualcomm, it has been actively developing in the AI field in recent years.

Looking ahead to 2024, Gartner expects the global semiconductor industry revenue to grow by 16.8% to $624 billion, with the memory market achieving double-digit percentage growth being the main driver, and almost all chip products are expected to grow in 2024.

Another research institution, TechInsights, includes wafer foundries in its statistics, and the overall trend is basically similar. The top 25 global semiconductor sales in 2023 listed by the institution show that TSMC and Intel successively overtook Samsung to rank first and second, respectively, while Samsung slid to fourth, and NVIDIA jumped to third.