Global Foundry Sales Expected to Grow 24% in 2020
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, global foundry companies are expected to see their sales grow the most in 10 years in 2020.
Market research firm TrendForce predicted on Nov. 19 that global foundry sales will increase 23.8 percent in 2020 from the previous year. This is the highest growth in the last 10 years. Sales are expected to top US$75 billion.
"Telecommuting, remote education, 5G smartphones, and telecommunication infrastructure expansion fueled demand for semiconductors," TrendForce said.
Other market research companies also predicted growth of the foundry market. Omdia predicted that sales in the global foundry market will increase 13.5 percent from US$60 billion in 2019 to US$68.2 billion in 2020. It also predicted that foundry sales will continue to grow to US$73.8 billion in 2021, US$80.5 billion in 2022, US$87.3 billion in 2023, and US$94.4 billion in 2024.
Taiwan's TSMC topped the global foundry market with a 53 percent share in the second quarter of 2020, followed by Samsung Electronics (19 percent), GlobalFoundries (8 percent), UMC (8 percent), and SMIC (5 percent). In the third quarter of 2020, TSMC accounted for 53.9 percent of the global foundry market against Samsung’s 17.4 percent, widening the gap widened between the first and second rankers.
TSMC and Samsung Electronics have a two-runner race in the under-10-nm chip market. The two chipmakers have reached their full wafer production capacity in the sub-10-nm product segment, TrendForce said.
TSMC is making application processors (APs) for the iPhone 12 series using a 5-nm process. The Taiwanese chipmaker is expected to produce the latest semiconductors for MediaTech, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm starting in 2021.
Samsung Electronics is likely to use 5-nano technology to produce NVIDIA's next-generation GPUs and Qualcomm's APs, but Samsung’s 5-nm chip production is expected to be only 20 percent of TSMC's, TrendForce said.