Semiconductor Foundries Growth 2002-2012

Update (August 2012): Our internal analysis shows GLOBALFOUNDRIES to become the second largest foundry worldwide and managed to break the 4B$ barrier. See below updated charts.

Foundry business is doing well, the semiconductor market is growing and there is a continues need for silicon component supply.

While we are aware of TSMC’s market leadership, and we follow foundry ranking data every year, there is no yet an overview of the last 10 years history. What actually happened in the last decade?

Well, I have been doing an intensive research, collecting market data, drinking a lot of coffee and struggling with Excel. And the output is shown in the following two charts. The charts describe the revenues per foundry and not absolute market position. This will help us see the actual sales revenues among the top 10 foundries because the gap is extremely important for this research.

Personally, my mind was totally blown away.

One can imagine from the below diagram that TSMC really needs its own scale. It seems that TSMC has captured so much market share while both UMC and GLOBALFOUNDRIES were trying the cross the 4B$ barrier. And rest of the top 10 foundries are just well below 2M$.

Zooming in into the 4M$ market, we can see GLOBALFOUNDRIES efforts payed off very well and it’s now ranked #2. The EMEA region has two players from top 10: TowerJazz (Israel) and XFAB (Germany). It’s very positive to see that 2 EMEA fabs are taking part in the top 10 semiconductor list.