IC Industry’s Long Tail

Flash is good. Toshiba the inventor and (almost) joint No.1 supplier of NAND was the third largest IC supplier in Q1, while the NAND-less Elpida’s revenues dropped 31% and the company slipped four positions down IC Insights’ rankings to end up at No.17.

But, in total, the top 20 manufacturers didn’t really do all that well in the Q110-Q111 time-frame – growing 11% while the market was growing over 30%.

None of them grew 30% – the best were Broadcom and Intel (25%), Qualcomm (22%), TSMC (18%), Freescale and Fujitsu (17%) and Samsung (15%). The rest grew under 11%.

Some shrank – like No.16 NXP (-4%) and No.7 Infineon (-6%).

In an overall semiconductor market with a quarterly run-rate of $75 billion, the top 20 accounted for $54.8 billion.

The industry is developing a long tail.

After the two biggies Intel ($11.8bn) and Samsung $8.2bn) you get four companies in the $3bn+ range – Toshiba ($3.6bn) TSMC ($3.4bn) TI ($3.2bn) and Renesas ($3bn) followed by four on $2bn+ – ST and Hynix ($2.5bn) Micron ($2.3bn) and Qualcomm ($2bn).

After that you get eight companies on $1bn+ and every other company in this 400 company industry is on less than a billion.

It doesn’t look like consolidation to me.