Global semiconductor revenue declined 12% in 2019: Gartner

With the US-China trade war distorting sales throughout 2019, global semiconductor revenue totalled $419.1 billion last year, down 12 per cent from 2018, according to final results by Gartner on Monday.

Intel regained the No. 1 position in the market as the downturn in the memory market negatively impacted many of the top vendors, including Samsung Electronics, the No. 1 vendor by revenue in 2018 and 2017.

Intel and Samsung were followed by SK hynix, Micron Technology, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, ST Microelectronics, NXP Semiconductors and Apple in the top 10.

"Oversupply in the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) market helped push the overall memory market down 32.7 per cent 2019. The memory market accounted for 26.1 per cent of semiconductor sales in 2019 and was the worst-performing device segment," Andrew Norwood, Research Vice President at Gartner said in a statement.

Within the memory segment, NAND flash suffered its worst sales contraction in its history with 2019 revenue declining 26.4 per cent due to elevated levels of inventory at the end of 2018 and sluggish demand in the first half of 2019.

Weak demand from smartphone and hyperscale cloud service providers drove down prices, Gartner said.

Performance in other device categories was mixed as analogue products declined 5.1 per cent in 2019 and the optoelectronics segment grew 6.6 per cent in 2019.

Analog components, which normally closely track the overall semiconductor market, experienced a decline due to weak end-equipment markets, especially industrial and legacy automotive.

Optoelectronics recorded the best performance of any device category due to the increasing number of cameras in smartphones, said the report.

"At this point, the global semiconductor market appears to be headed for another decline in 2020, due to the impact of the coronavirus on semiconductor supply and demand," said Norwood.

"We expect the global semiconductor market to decline 0.9 per cent in 2020, which is down from forecasted growth of 12.5 per cent at the end of 2019." IANS