Samsung is focussing heavily on its semiconductor business as profits from the company's mobile device business are declining. The South Korean semiconductor giant even narrowed the gap with Intel, the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, in terms of sales.
According to a market research firm IHS iSuppli, Samsung turned over $10.366 billion in the second quarter of 2015, representing 12 percent of the global semiconductor market. On the other hand, Intel posted $11.797 billion in sales with a global market share of 13.6 percent. This leaves a gap of just 1.6 percent marketshare between these two semiconductor giants, and this is the first time this gap is in the range of 1 percent.
This is the first time that Samsung has posted sales worth over $10 billion, becoming the second semiconductor company to surpass that number after Intel. These semiconductor sales include memory as well as non-memory semiconductor chipsets. The gap between these two companies was 6.9 percent in 2011, 6.0 percent 2012, 4.3 percent in 2013, and 3.4 percent in 2014. Samsung's marketshare increased by 0.8 percent in Q2 2015 while Intel's grew by 0.3 percent.
SK Hynix now holds a market share of 4.9 percent, and the company has defeated Qualcomm, which is the world's largest mobile chipset maker. Starting this year, Samsung has increased the use of its homegrown Exynos chipsets in its smartphones, tablets, and wearables.
