Intel is back on top of the semiconductor market as the company with the highest revenue for 2019 – after ranking second behind Samsung in both 2017 and 2018. The main factor behind this change is said to be a decreased demand for DRAM, which has hit Intel's competition hard.

DigiTimes reports that “Intel reclaims top position in semiconductors” when using the revenue of the different companies as a basis for its ranking. It's reported that in 2019 the market as a whole saw a dip of 12% in revenue compared to 2018, something that had a bigger impact on other companies than it had on Intel.

Andrew Norwood, research VP at Gartner says: “Oversupply in the DRAM market helped push the overall memory market down 32.7% 2019. The memory market accounted for 26.1% of semiconductor sales in 2019 and was the worst-performing device segment,”. Samsung is bigger on memory production than Intel, which has led to Samsung being hit harder by the decrease in demand.

Image credit: Slejven Djurakovic on Unsplash

Gartner – the research and advisory company mentioned earlier – has also made a prediction for how the semiconductor market is going to develop through the year 2020. Originally, at the end of 2019 a 12.5% growth was estimated. However, as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak Gartner has revised its global semiconductor market outlook this year to a 0.9% dip.

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KitGuru says: Intel and Samsung are swapping places back and forth as the leader of the semiconductor market. However, both companies will have many challenges ahead of them in 2020.

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