A few brief updates before moving to the rest of our weekly news round-up. Korean memory maker SK Hynix is reportedly considering the creation of a consortium to buy Arm. Speaking of memories, Apple is reportedly exploring alternative Flash suppliers for its iPhones, including China-based Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. Moving to the autonomous vehicle scenario, Waymo has started testing fully autonomous operations in San Francisco with Jaguar I-PACE electric cars. This new step comes after years of testing of fully autonomous service in the East Valley of Phoenix.
2021 semiconductor revenues
According to market research firm Omdia, the worldwide semiconductor market surpassed annual revenue of half-a-trillion dollars for the first time ever in 2021, and nearly 60% of companies in the sector grew by more than 20% in revenues. On an annual basis, Intel ranked as the number one semiconductor company in 2021, with revenue at $76.6B, which represented 13% of all semiconductor revenue for the year. Intel’s 2021 revenue growth was nearly flat from 2020, in contrast with the following top nine semiconductor firms which all experienced year-over-year growth above 15%. Omdia points out that the MPU product category – Intel’s core business – grew at just 11% YoY last year, much lower than the total semiconductor growth level of 24%. Samsung finished 2021 just behind Intel, with semiconductor revenue of $75.2B, representing 12.8% of all revenue for the industry. Samsung growth owes to the strong increase in the DRAM and NAND markets (up 42% and 23% respectively in 2021), as the Korean firm is the number one vendor for both product categories.
Source: Omdia
