Stamford (CT) – Gartner today released its 2007 estimate of semiconductor revenues – and Intel apparently regained what it had lost in 2006, but the real winner of the year is Toshiba, which achieved a 28% increase in chip revenues and has become the world’s third largest semiconductor company.

The Gartner report almost exactly mirrors revenue estimates published earlier this month by iSuppli. The big news among the semiconductor top 10 of course is that Intel’s turn-around is reflected by solid chip revenue growth. In 2006, the competitive pressure from AMD brought Intel a 9.5% decrease in revenues, which resulted in a rather dramatic drop of the firm’s market share from 14.7% to 11.6%. In 2007, Gartner estimates that Intel was able to improve its revenue by 8.2% to 32.9 billion - not quite the level of the $34.6 billion in 2005 – but enough to lift the firm’s market share to 12.2%.

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“Intel’s growth came primarily from strong shipments of mobile PCs”, Gartner said. “Armed with a strong product lineup for enthusiast desktops and servers, Intel regained lost share in those markets from AMD.”

Samsung remained in #2 with $20.9 billion in chip revenues and a 7.7% market share. Toshiba, ranked at position 5 in 2006 jumped into third, with revenues climbing almost 28% from $9.8 billion to $12.5 billion. The company replaced Texas Instruments, which was among three companies that are estimated to have seen declining revenues in 2007: Gartner believes TI’s sales dropped by 4.2% to $11.5 billion.

AMD is not listed among the ten largest chip companies. Market research firm iSuppli estimates that AMD will post 2007 chip revenues of about $5.7 billion , which puts the company at position 11 in both the iSuppli and Gartner rankings. In fact iSuppli and Gartner have come up with chip revenue estimates that are, in aggregate and in terms of growth rates, close to each other. Both companies put the total semiconductor revenue for 2007 into the range between $270 billion and $271 billion, which represents a slight increase over the 2006 result of about $260 billion.