There were two new entrants into the top-10 ranking in 1Q20, HiSilicon and Nvidia.

HiSilicon has become the first Chinese company to get into the top ten semiconductor league table, according to IC Insights.

Fabless vendor HiSilicon jumped five spots in the ranking to 10th place after  year-over-year sales rose 54% in 1Q20.

Figure 1

In total, the top-10 semiconductor companies’ sales increased by 16% in 1Q20 compared to 1Q19, more than twice the total worldwide semiconductor industry 1Q20/1Q19 increase of 7%.

Nine of the top-10 companies had sales of at least $3 billion in 1Q20, one company more than in 1Q19.

As shown, it took almost $2.7 billion in quarterly sales just to make it into the 1Q20 top-10 semiconductor supplier list.

These two companies replaced Infineon and Kioxia in the top-10 listing.

HiSilicon is the semiconductor design division of China-based telecommunications giant Huawei and over 90% of HiSilicon’s sales go to its parent company.

Nvidia also posted a solid year-over-year sales increase of 37% in 1Q20.

The top-10 ranking includes one pure-play foundry, TSMC, which registered a strong 45% 1Q20/1Q19 jump in revenue. Much of this increase was due to a surge in sales of 7nm application processors to Apple and HiSilicon for their respective smartphones.

As shown in Figure 2, HiSilicon has become an increasingly important customer for TSMC and represented 14% of its sales last year, up from holding only a 5% share in 2017.  It is interesting to note that HiSilicon and Apple combined to represent 37% of TSMC’s total sales in 2019.

Figure 2

IC Insights includes foundries in the top-10 semiconductor supplier ranking since it has always viewed the ranking as a top supplier list, not a marketshare ranking, and realizes that in some cases the semiconductor sales are double counted.