A survey by Dataquest Europe said that most of the top tier chip companies, with the exception of Intel, Philips and ST Micro, suffered big declines in sales in 1998. Joe D'Elia, associate director for Dataquest Europe, who compiled the report, said: "Semiconductor vendors around the world are glad to see the back of 1998." He said that the future of the DRAM memory market, in particular, was unclear, after suffering its third bad year in a row, hit by over capacity. The Asian financial crisis affected the entire industry during 1998. Intel, however, managed to buck the trend, and kept its number one position in the market, growing by 4.3 per cent over 1997 with sales of $22,675,000,000. Second was NEC, which suffered 19.1 negative growth, amounting to revenues for the year of $8,271,000,000. The other players who recorded negative growth were Motorola, at -14.2 per cent, Toshiba at -16.5 per cent, TI at -18.4 per cent and Samsung at -18.9 per cent. However, Hitachi fared the worse in the top ten, showing negative growth of 26.2 per cent, amounting to revenues for 1998 of $4,649,000. European companies did better than expected. Philips Semi turned in growth of 1.4 per cent, producing revenues of $4,502,000, Siemens showed a 12.4 per cent growth, and ST Microelectronics (formerly SGS Thomsen), recorded a seven per cent growth. ®