Gartner says worldwide semiconductor revenue grew 10.4% in 2020

Worldwide semiconductor revenues totalled $466.2b in 2020, an increase of 10.4 per cent from 2019, according to a new report by Gartner.

Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner said that memory, GPUs and 5G chipsets led semiconductor growth last year driven by hyperscale, PC, ultramobile and 5G handset end-market demand. Automotive and industrial electronics suffered due to lower spending or a pause in spending owing to Covid-19, he added.

Intel retained its position as the top global semiconductor vendor by revenue in 2020, followed by Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron (see table below). Intel’s semiconductor revenue grew 7.4 per cent, driven by the growth of its core client and server CPU businesses.

Overall, the top performers in the top 10 were Nvidia and MediaTek. Nvidia’s 45.2 per cent growth was primarily driven by the company’s gaming-related and data centre businesses. MediaTek’s revenue grew 38.1 per cent in 2020 driven by the disruption to Huawei’s business throughout the year.

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Memory, which accounted for 26.7 per cent of semiconductor sales in 2020, was the second best-performing device category, experiencing a 13.5 per cent revenue increase. According to Norwood, memory benefited from the shift to home working and learning which fuelled increased server build from hyperscale vendors to satisfy online working and entertainment, as well as a surge in PCs and ultramobiles.

Within memory, NAND flash experienced the best performance with revenue growth of 25.2 per cent due to a shortage in the first half of 2020, the report added.