AMD, Kicked Out of the Top

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have entered the chip manufacturers elite immediately after the fusion with graphical chip maker ATI. There are signs that AMD won't be able to keep up with the ranking because of low revenue.

AMD is ranked as number eight in the largest chip manufacturers top, with revenues that jumped up from $3.9 billion in 2005
to $7.5 billion in 2006 – an increase of more than 90 percent during a single year. Market trends, however, are wearing gray colors for the company, as their sales are estimated to take a full-blown hit and drop from 22.8% to $5.8 billion, which would surely cast AMD away on a shameful #11. The Intel competition is estimated to recover from the market share loss that has occurred back in 2006 and will gain about 7.7% that would reflect in sales going from $31.5 billion to 34.0 billion – a huge leap for the chip powerhog.

"Throughout most of the year, Intel successfully defended much of the market share that it won from AMD in the first quarter in the PC microprocessor segment due to the success of its lines of dual- and quad-core chips," said Dale Ford, vice president, market intelligence, for iSuppli. "This represents a major reversal of fortune compared to 2006, when AMD had the advantage with its popular dual-core microprocessors, allowing it to gain share from Intel."

Apart from AMD, Texas Instruments (TI) is the only top 10 manufacturer to face sales loss, which is very likely to show the company off the top, too. Texas Instruments is fueled in proportion of more that 45 percent by its wireless communications chips business. The chipmaker is likely to suffer this year a 3.4% decline in global semiconductor revenue, as Nokia moved to other chip manufacturers, such as Infineon.

"Nokia, the world’s largest seller of mobile phones, historically has used Texas Instruments as its near-exclusive supplier of wireless baseband suppliers. However, the company has engaged in a strategic initiative to add other baseband suppliers to reduce its dependency on Texas Instruments. This has benefited other companies such as Infineon, but has cut into Texas Instruments’ sales", concluded Ford.