Motorola pushed out of global chip making elite

Joins IBM, AMD

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

Posted in Mac Channel, 24th July 2003 10:36 GMT

Free research: Application platforms, the state of play

Motorola is no longer a top-ten global chip maker. The latest figures from market watcher IC Insights, of vendors' worldwide semiconductor sales during H1 2003, show the company slide out of the top ten for the first time in its history.

The chip maker notched up sales of $2.27 billion during the first half of the year, a decline of just five per cent over the same period the year before but enough to knock it into eleventh place. The top ten chip makers all reported increasing sales during the comparison periods.

Historically, Motorola was the world's third largest chip maker in 1985, just after the launch of the Mac, incidentally. By 1995, just after the launch of the PowerPC, it had dropped to fifth place.

Intel may dominate the market - and most of the top ten vendors have the same ranking during the first half of 2003 as they did during 2002's initial six months, as the table below shows - but Motorola is in good company off the leader board, ranking as it does above IBM, AMD and UMC. ®

Top ten worldwide chip vendors
Rank	Vendor	H1 2003 sales	Growth	Previous rank
1	Intel	$12.21bn	3%	1
2	Samsung	$4.13bn	6%	2
3	Renesas*	$4.09bn	14%	N/A
4	Texas Instruments	$3.8bn	16%	4
5	Toshiba	$3.66bn	27%	5
6	STMicro	$3.32bn	15%	6
7	Infineon	$3.26bn	30%	8
8	NEC	$3.04bn	18%	7
9	Philips	$2.57bn	5%	11
10	TSMC	$2.56bn	11%	9
Source: IC Insights
*JV between Hitachi and Mitsubishi