By Joe Wilcox, Betanews
Ten companies accounted for a third of semiconductor demand in 2010, according to data released today by Gartner. HP, Samsung and Apple topped the list. Gartner measures semiconductors on what it calls a design total available market, or TAM, basis. The leaders accounted for $104.3 billion revenue, which rose 33.7 percent year or year, or $26.3 billion.
"Semiconductor device vendors should closely monitor the changing competition structure of the target market," Masatsune Yamaji, Gartner senior research analyst, said in a statement "Do not just listen to the requirements of the current market leaders. Have a dedicated sales team, with business development sales metrics, looking for new market entrants who will be the next-generation market leaders."
Gartner singled out Apple as leading "the new competitive landscape of the IT and electronics industry," by providing vertically integrated software, hardware and supporting services and outsourcing production to electronics manufacturing service providers, typically in Asia. Additionally, its products cover the range of leading design TAM successes, such as smartphones, media players and media tablets; Gartner described the latter category as the "new killer application."
Samsung benefitted from strong demand for smartphones and flat-panel LCD TVs. Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba also benefitted from the latter category. Gartner predicted that the TV service platform market would be a "key growth segment" during the decade 2010 and noted that Apple and Google have made strategic investments in settop boxes.
"Judging from purchasing TAM, Asia/Pacific, and especially China, offers the greatest opportunities in most of the device and application market segments," Yamaji said in the statement. "It will be difficult for most of the semiconductor device vendors, especially replaceable general-purpose device vendors, to achieve the full design-win benefit without establishing a strong distribution network in Asia/Pacific."
