Widening Its Lead over Samsung
Taiwan's TSMC will continue on its uptrend in 2021 despite its severance of business ties with China's Huawei under pressure from the U.S. government, a recent report predicted.
Credit Suisse predicted in a recent report that TSMC's sales will increase 6 percent from 2020 to reach US$37,711 million in 2021. This forecast is based on the assumption that Huawei's share in the company’s total sales will fall from 8.9 percent in 2020 to 0 percent in 2021.
Taiwan’s Mediatek is expected to place an additional order of US$1.4 billion on TSMC in 2021. Apple is also expected to increase its order by US$2.1 billion. As a result, Mediatek and Apple’s shares in TSMC’s sales will rise from 4.9 percent to 8.2 percent and from 22.7 percent to 26.4 percent, respectively. The report also forecast that Qualcomm will account for 6.8 percent, Broadcom 8.6 percent, AMD 9.3 percent and NVIDIA 4.9 percent of TSMC’s sales in 2021.
As the U.S. sanctions against Huawei are expected to have a limited impact on TSMC, Samsung Electronics’ efforts to overtake the Taiwanese company are expected to take more time. Samsung Electronics is expected to have an 18.8 percent share of the global foundry market versus TSMC’s 51.5 percent in the second quarter of 2020, says market research firm TrendForce.
Although Samsung has grown significantly from 2016 when it placed 4th with a 5 percent market share, its presence has remained at the 18-19 percent range for more than a year since the beginning of 2019.
According to a report released by SK Securities on June 16, TSMC is superior to Samsung Electronics in terms of transistor concentration per unit area in the 5-nano process. TSMC is seeking to stay ahead of Samsung Electronics in microfabrication competition by beginning to install 3-nano process equipment.
TSMC is a foundry company that maintains a firm principle of "not competing with customers." On the other hand, Samsung Electronics is facing difficulties in landing large orders as it competes with major foundry customers such as Qualcomm and Apple in application processors (APs). TSMC will reportedly produce the A15 application processor for Apple's iPhone 13 to be released in 2021.