FSA: Industry saw $129B in first half sales

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 10/24/2007

In additions released this week by the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) to its global semiconductor fundings and financial report, the industry group painted a portrait of a tepidly performing semiconductor industry led by North American companies.

The report was formerly known as the global fabless fundings and financials report, but has now been expanded to include financial information on fabless companies as well as integrated device manufacturers (IDM), pure-play foundries, and industry players in the intellectual property (IP), electronic design automation (EDA) and back-end sectors.

As the fabless business model continues to become popular in the industry, evidenced by the shift away from manufacturing for companies including LSI Corp. and Cypress Semiconductor Inc., fabless and IDM companies showed the most significant year-over-year growth in the report. 263 fabless and IDM companies reported $63.9 billion in revenue in Q2, an increase of 9 percent year-over-year, but a 2.4 percent decrease quarter-over-quarter, FSA said.

However, the report shows that most segments of the overall industry have taken a hit in 2007 in comparison to their 2006 performances. According to the FSA, for the first half of 2007, semiconductor industry revenue totaled $129.3 billion, mostly in line with firms' predictions that semiconductor revenue will reach around $270 billion by year's end. North American semiconductor companies represented 52 percent of that revenue, followed by Asia with 37 percent, Europe with 11 percent, and India with less than 1 percent.

Looking closer within the report, FSA found that many companies showed solid quarter-over-quarter gains in Q2 but are still lagging behind the performances they enjoyed one year ago. The top five packaging and test companies by Q2 revenue reported $2.4 billion in revenue, an increase of 4 percent from Q1, but a 3 percent decrease year-over-year. The FSA said that the leading foundries, TSMC, UMC, SMIC and Chartered, reported $3.7 billion in revenue in Q2, an increase of 10 percent from Q1, but a decrease of 7 percent year-over-year. The top 10 IP companies by Q2 revenue reported $295 million in
sales, a decrease of 0.2 percent from Q1 and a decrease of 1 percent year-over-year.

And as usual, the industry proved itself to be rather top-heavy. The top 10 semiconductor companies by Q2 revenue (see below) combined for $30 billion, or 47 percent, of total Q2 semiconductor revenue, FSA reported.



Top 10 companies by Q2 revenue

 1. Intel: $8.7B
 2. Samsung: $4.6B
 3. Texas Instruments: $3.3B
 4. Toshiba: $2.5B
 5. STMicroelectronics: $2.4B
 6. Hynix Semiconductor: $2.1B
 7. Renesas: $2.0B
 8. Sony: $1.6B
 9. NXP Semiconductors: $1.5B
 10. Advanced Micro Devices: $1.4B

Source: FSA, 10/07