Samsung Is Now The World’s Biggest Chipmaker

The tech giant, Samsung Electronics is now the world biggest chipmaker by revenue as it usurped the position from Intel. Intel has held the number 1 spot since 1992. Samsung reported 2017 chip sales of $69 billion to Intel’s $63 billion from last year.

The shows that Samsung is gradually transforming itself from a maker of electronics into a supplier of key components in smartphones and other modern computing devices.

Intel, whose processors are the heart of about 90 percent of the world’s computers, didn’t have a bad year. Sales grew 6 percent. However, dominating computers is no longer enough. Memory chips, a market Intel only recently got back into, are now crucial parts of smartphones, which easily outsell PCs. Memory chips are also finding their way into a range of new devices such as cars.

Samsung’s success in memory is that it’s a business Intel created in the 1960s. The U.S. company exited the market when competition from Japanese companies became too great in the early 1990s, then recently re-entered. One of Intel’s biggest growth areas last year was memory chips, but it has a long way to go to catch up with Samsung.