Samsung was the third largest foundry in 2012 and expects to be the second largest foundry in 2013, says IC Insights.
TSMC's 2012 sales were almost 4x that of second-ranked GlobalFoundries and more than 10x the sales of the fifth-ranked foundry SMIC.
There were only three IDM foundries in the ranking--Samsung, IBM, and MagnaChip.
Samsung was by far the largest IDM foundry in 2012 with almost 10x the sales of IBM, the second largest IDM foundry.
In 2012, Samsung almost doubled its foundry sales and surpassed UMC to become the third-largest IC foundry in the world.
IC Insights believes that the company will challenge GlobalFoundries for the number two spot in the ranking in 2013.
Samsung has the ability (i.e., leading-edge capacity and a huge capital spending budget) and desire to become a major force in the IC foundry business.
Samsung's dedicated IC foundry capacity reached 150K 300mm wafers per month in 4Q12. Using an average-revenue-per-wafer figure of $3,000, Samsung's IC foundry capacity currently has the potential to produce annual sales of about $5.4bn.In 2012, Samsung was the largest supplier of smartphones in the world by a wide margin, shipping 220m handsets with Apple coming in second, selling 133m iPhones.
So Samsung and Apple represented almost half of the total worldwide smartphone shipments (750 million) last year. And Samsung is supplying application processors to the largest (i.e., itself) and second largest (i.e., Apple) smartphone supplier.
After jumping by 82% in 2011, Samsung's foundry sales surged by another 98% in 2012, easily making it the fastest growing top-12 foundry in 2011 and 2012.
Apple's 2012 share of Samsung's total foundry sales was 89%. However, as Apple begins to engage other foundries (e.g., TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and possibly Intel) to produce its custom processors, Samsung will need to make up for these lost sales by signing on additional large-scale customers.
Despite its court-room battles, Apple is still very reliant on Samsung for its advanced IC processor production for its iPad tablets, iPhones handsets, and high-end iPod portable media players.
TSMC was working at over 100% utilization throughout the first three quarters of 2012 and essentially had no ability to allocate large amounts of leading edge IC production capacity to Apple.
Since Apple is such a big memory customer, Samsung is able to "bundle" its IC offerings to Apple and deliver a cost-effective high-volume supply of leading-edge flash memory, DRAM, and application processors to the company.
As of early-2013, no other foundry in the world could come close to matching Samsung's total IC supply capabilities.
There is no doubt that Apple is looking to diversify away from being so reliant on its major system level competitor and court-room adversary, but IC Insights believes this transition will happen over a few years rather than a few quarters.
The top 12 foundries represented 90% of total foundry sales (IDM and pure-play) in 2012.
This share is nine points higher than the 81% figure the top 12 represented in 2009 (before Samsung dramatically ramped up IC foundry production for Apple).
With the barriers to entry (e.g., fab costs, access to leading edge technology, etc.) into the foundry business being so high and rising, IC Insights expects the Top 12 marketshare figure to continue to rise in the future.
