Samsung climbs up consumer chip ranking

These days, it’s hard to find a semiconductor segment Samsung is not trying to achieve a dominating position. And as market research firm iSuppli reports, the Korean company now has entered the race for the top spot in the consumer chips business.

iSuppli defines consumer chips as any semiconductor that is used in consumer electronics applications, such as MP3 players, personal and portable stereos, home audio, TVs, camcorders, digital still cameras, digital set top boxes, video game consoles, and handheld video game players.

Compared to 2003, Samsung increased its consumer semiconductor revenue jump 84.2 percent in 2004 - from $1.1 billion to $2.1 billion. The firm’s market share swelled to 6.7 percent and lifted the firm from the 10th to the 4th spot of the iSuppli ranking. This puts Samsung in the same league as the vertically-integrated, Japanese consumer-electronics powerhouses that traditionally have dominated the market, Toshiba, Sony and Matsushita, which maintained their top-three positions in 2004.

Toshiba leads the pack revenues of $5.2 billion and 16.5 percent market share, Sony follows with $3.8 billion (12.0 percent) and Matsushita with $2.7 billion (8.6 percent). iSuppli said that much of the Samsung’s consumer-electronics-chip revenue growth in 2004 was due to a 109.4 percent rise in sales of memories into the segment. Revenues in this area climbed to $932 million, up from $445 million in 2003.