Intel is still the chip industry

IC Insights, a market research company, recently released a research report that, according to revenue, Intel is still the largest chip maker, but its market share has been eroded by Samsung and Qualcomm.

In the first quarter of this year, Intel’s chip sales were US$11.56 billion, a decrease of 3% from US$11.87 billion in the first quarter of last year.

Driven by orders from Apple, sales of Samsung chips increased by 13% to US$7.95 billion.

In the first quarter of this year, global chip sales rose by 2% to US$53.5 billion. The fourth-largest chipmaker Qualcomm’s chip sales rose 28% to US$3.9 billion, the highest increase. Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips are used in several new models of smartphones, including the HTC One and some models of the Galaxy S4.

The sales volume of the largest chip foundry TSMC increased 26% to US$4.46 billion; GlobalFoundries and UMC were the second and third largest chip foundries.

Intel owns the most advanced chip manufacturing facility in the current process and will begin manufacturing 14nm process chips early next year. TSMC and GlobalFoundries hope to overtake Intel in chip manufacturing technology and begin production of chips using 3D transistor technology next year.