According to the latest forecast data released by market research firm Gartner, the total global semiconductor revenue in 2024 will be $626 billion, an increase of 18.1%. Among the top 10 semiconductor manufacturers in the world in 2024, Samsung, Intel and Nvidia rank the top three. At the same time, Gartner expects that, driven by the demand for AI, total global semiconductor revenue will increase by 12.6% year-on-year to reach $705 billion in 2025. While this forecast is lower than Future Horizons' 15 percent forecast, it is higher than the World Semiconductor Trade Organization's 11.2 percent estimate and Semiconductor Intelligence's 6 percent estimate. "Graphics processing units (Gpus) and AI processors used in data center applications (servers and accelerator cards) are key drivers for the chip industry in 2024," said George Brocklehurst, vice president analyst at Gartner. "The growing demand for artificial intelligence and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) workloads has led to data centers becoming the second largest semiconductor market after smartphones in 2024. Data center semiconductor revenue totaled $112 billion in 2024, up from $64.8 billion in 2023." Looking at specific vendor performance, only eight of the top 25 semiconductor suppliers by revenue in 2024 experienced a decline in semiconductor revenue, while 11 suppliers achieved double-digit percentage growth. Among the top 10 manufacturers, only Infineon's semiconductor revenue declined year-on-year, and the rest achieved year-on-year growth. ● Samsung Electronics' semiconductor revenue in 2024 is expected to be $66.5 billion, up 62.5% year on year, mainly due to the growth in demand for memory chips and a strong rebound in prices, successfully helping Samsung Electronics regain the top position from Intel and extend its lead over the company. Samsung Electronics' financial report also shows that in 2024, Samsung Electronics' DS division, which is mainly engaged in semiconductor business including memory and wafer foundry, generated annual revenue of 111.1 trillion won, an increase of 67%. Samsung also attributed the increase to higher average selling prices of DRAM and increased sales of HBM and high-density DDR5. Its HBM3E products have already been mass-produced and sold in the third quarter of 2024, and in the fourth quarter of 2024, HBM3E has been supplied to several GPU vendors and data center vendors, and sales have exceeded HBM3. HBM sales for the full fourth quarter were up 190% sequentially, but this was still lower than previously expected. "The 16-layer HBM3E is in the phase of customer sample delivery, and the sixth generation HBM4 is expected to be mass-produced in the second half of 2025," a Samsung official said. Intel's 2024 semiconductor revenue is expected to be $49.189 billion, up only 0.1% year over year, ranking second in the world. While the AI PC market and its Core Ultra chipset appear to be seeing decent growth, its AI accelerator products and overall x86 business are doing so-so. Intel's latest earnings report shows that its overall revenue in the 2024 fiscal year was $53.1 billion, down 2% from the same period last year. After the outbreak of Intel's financial crisis in September 2024, Intel announced that it would reduce its global workforce by 15%, cut capital expenditures (by $10 billion in capital expenditures by 2025), and suspend the construction of factories in Germany and Poland. Although Intel's performance has improved in the next two quarters, it is still not optimistic. Looking at full-year 2024 performance by segment, its customer computing group revenue increased only 3.5% year-over-year to $30.29 billion, and data center and Artificial intelligence (AI) group revenue increased only 1.4% year-over-year to $12.817 billion. In contrast, Nvidia, AMD and other chip manufacturers have benefited from the growth of AI demand, and their AI business revenue has a high double-digit percentage increase. Nvidia's 2024 semiconductor revenue jumped 84% year over year to $46 billion. Due to the strong demand for its AI chips, it moved up two places in the ranking, ranking third globally. According to Nvidia's previously announced financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 ending on October 27, 2024, revenue for the quarter reached $35.1 billion, up 94% year-on-year and up 17% sequentially. For the fourth quarter, Nvidia expects revenue of $37.5 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, up 70 percent sequentially from the third quarter. SK Hynix semiconductor revenue in 2024 is expected to reach $42.824 billion, up 86% year-on-year, and its ranking has also risen two places to fourth in the world. SK Hynix's growth was mainly due to strong growth in its High bandwidth (HBM) business. SK Hynix's latest financial report shows that its revenue in 2024 was 66.1930 trillion won, up 102% year-on-year, a new high in revenue over the past year, and its operating profit exceeded the performance of the ultra-prosperous memory chip market in 2018. SK Hynix also announced that it achieved its highest annual performance thanks to industry-leading HBM technology strength and profitable business activities amid strong demand for semiconductor memory for AI. Among them, HBM, which showed a high growth trend in the fourth quarter of 2024, accounted for more than 40% of the entire DRAM sales (30% in the third quarter), and enterprise solid state drive (eSSD) sales continued to increase. The company has established a stable financial position based on profitable operations based on the competitiveness of differentiated products, thus continuing to maintain the trend of performance improvement. Qualcomm's 2024 semiconductor revenue was $32.358 billion, up 10.7% year-over-year and dropping two places to fifth. Although Qualcomm's revenue growth is much lower than Samsung, Nvidia, SK Hynix and other leading manufacturers, but thanks to the help of its Snapdragon 8 extreme mobile platform, its revenue growth is still better than the growth of the smartphone market (market research agency Canalys data show that the global smartphone market in 2024 strong rebound shipments reached 1.22 billion units, Year-on-year growth of 7%). However, Qualcomm's energy-consuming Snapdragon X series platform for the PC market is not successful, data show that Qualcomm Snapdragon X series PC only shipped 720,000 units in the third quarter, with a market share of only 0.8%. According to Qualcomm's financial report for the fiscal year 2024, which ended on September 29, 2024, Qualcomm's revenue for the fiscal year was $38.962 billion, an increase of 9% compared to $35.82 billion in the previous fiscal year. In terms of revenue sources, 46% came from customers based in China. Driven by the Snapdragon 8 Extreme mobile platform, Qualcomm expects revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2025 (equivalent to the fourth quarter of Natural year 2024) to be between $10.5 billion and $11.3 billion, with a median of $10.9 billion, higher than the average market analyst estimate of $10.54 billion. Micron's semiconductor revenue in 2024 is expected to be $27.843 billion, up 72.7% year on year, and moving up six places to sixth. The growth of Micron's revenue and ranking is also mainly due to the strong demand for HBM in the AI market. According to Micron's financial report for the fiscal year 2024, which ended on August 29, 2024, its revenue for the fiscal year 2024 reached $25.111 billion, a year-on-year increase of 61.59%. Micron pointed out that as one of Micron's highest margin products, its HBM revenue for AI data processing has maintained strong growth. Its data center business, where HBM is located, achieved record annual revenue in fiscal year 2024 and will grow significantly in fiscal year 2025. This year and next year, Micron's HBM production capacity has been sold out, and during this period, Micron has also finalized HBM order prices for this year and next year with customers. The subsequent Micron 2025 fiscal year first quarter (as of November 28, 2024) earnings report showed that the fiscal quarter revenue was $8.709 billion, close to the average analyst expectation of $8.71 billion, an increase of 84.1% year on year, an increase of 12.4% quarter on quarter, a record high. While first-quarter results were indeed weighed down by DRAM inventory overhang in end-markets such as smartphones and PCS, they were offset by a 400% explosion in the data center business, driven by cloud server DRAM demand and HBM revenue growth. Although the HBM market is currently dominated by SK Hynix, this year, Micron's HBM3E entered Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence chip and the newly developed strongest Blackwell system, which will greatly stimulate Micron's HBM revenue growth. Micron CEO has previously predicted that the global market size of HBM chips will increase to about $25 billion in 2025, significantly higher than the $4 billion in 2023, which will also boost the memory chip market size to jump to $204 billion in 2025. In the first quarter earnings call, Micron's CEO has increased the HBM market size to $30 billion in 2025. Broadcom's 2024 semiconductor revenue is expected to be $27.841 billion, up 7.9% year over year, but it will slip three places to seventh. Broadcom's revenue for fiscal year 2024, which ended November 3, 2024, was approximately $51.6 billion, an increase of 44% year-over-year and a record high. But that revenue growth was largely due to the acquisition of VMware, which combined the two companies' revenues. Hock Tan, President and CEO of Broadcom, also explained, "Broadcom's revenue for fiscal year 2024 increased 44% year-over-year to a record $51.6 billion, as infrastructure software revenue grew to $21.5 billion." "However, driven by AI's demand for custom chips, Broadcom's semiconductor revenue also reached a record $30.1 billion in fiscal year 2024, including $12.2 billion in AI revenue, up 220% year-over-year, driven by our leading AI XPU and Ethernet networking portfolio." AMD's 2024 semiconductor revenue is expected to be $23.948 billion, up 7.4% year-over-year and slipping one place to eighth. According to AMD's fiscal year 2024 financial report released on February 4, 2025 local time, the fiscal year revenue reached a record $25.8 billion, an increase of 14%. Benefiting from the strong demand in the AI market, AMD's data center division's revenue reached a new high of $12.6 billion in 2024, up 94% from the same period last year. In addition, its PC chip client segment revenue in 2024 also reached a new high of $2.3 billion, up 58% year on year. But the games division saw revenue plunge 58% to $2.6 billion due to a decline in semi-custom revenue. Embedded segment revenue in 2024 also plunged 33% year-over-year to $3.6 billion, primarily due to normalization of inventory levels as customers clear inventory. Apple's 2024 semiconductor revenue is expected to be $18.88 billion, up 4.6% year over year and up 1 place to ninth. Apple's financial results for the fiscal year 2024, which ended on September 28, showed that its revenue for the fiscal year increased only 2% to $391 billion due to slowing demand in the smartphone and PC markets. The latest financial report for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025 (the fourth quarter of 2024) shows that Apple's revenue for the quarter increased 4% year-on-year to $124.3 billion, a record high, and better than analysts' expectations of $124.1 billion. Revenue from its core iPhone business edged down 0.9% year-over-year, but it still generated $69.138 billion. Mac revenue increased 15.5 percent to $8.987 billion. iPad revenue also increased 15.2% year-over-year to $8.088 billion. At present, Apple's iPhone/Mac/iPad product line is basically using its own processors. ● Infineon's 2024 semiconductor revenue is expected to be $16.01 billion, down 6% year on year and down one place to 10th. According to Infineon's financial results for the fiscal year 2024 to the end of September 2024, Infineon's revenue for the fiscal year decreased by 8% to 14.955 billion euros, a year-on-year decrease of 8%. Infineon CEO Jochen Hanebeck also said in a statement at the time: "Currently, with the exception of artificial intelligence, our end markets have virtually no growth drivers and cyclical recovery is being delayed." As a result, we are preparing for a lower business trajectory in 2025." However, Infineon's financial report for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025 ending December 31, 2024, announced on February 4, 2025 local time, showed that the revenue of the fiscal quarter was 3.424 billion euros, down 13% year-on-year. This was mainly due to weaker demand in four segments: Automotive (ATV), Green Industrial Power (GIP), Power and Sensor Systems (PSS), and Connected Security Systems (CSS). However, the overall results were still better than market expectations, and as a result, Infineon revised its revenue for fiscal year 2025 from "slightly down" to "flat or slightly up" for now. HBM has become the growth engine of the head memory manufacturers, and will account for 19.2% of the overall DRAM revenue in 2025, Gartner data also shows that in 2024, global memory chip revenue soared 71.8% year-on-year, making the share of memory chips in total semiconductor sales increased to 25.2%. In contrast, in 2024, semiconductor revenue outside of storage only grew by 6.9% year-over-year, of which DRAM revenue grew by 75.4% in 2024 and NAND revenue grew by 75.7% year-over-year. HBM's revenue growth contributed significantly to the DRAM vendor's revenue. In 2024, HBM's revenue will account for 13.6% of total DRAM revenue. It is expected to further increase to 19.2% by 2025. According to Brocklehurst, "Memory and AI semiconductors will drive near-term growth, with HBM's share of DRAM revenues expected to increase, reaching 19.2% by 2025." HBM's revenue is expected to grow 66.3 percent to $19.8 billion by 2025.
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