It has always been a cat and mouse game between world’s largest chipmakers, each trying to outdo the other. Interestingly, it has always been Intel at the top since the past 25 years. Though, now times have changed, as Samsung has emerged to be successful in attaining the world’s largest chipmaker title, which makes Intel drop off to second.
The largest chipmaker rankings switched places when Samsung posted its end of year financials for the year 2017. Samsung which is a South Korean based tech-giant, is known for a vast variety of products, with the most of the revenue coming from its chipset division. It heavily relies on this division for its revenues, which can be shown by the fact that the Samsung’s revenues for its chipset division were a whopping $69 Billion! Yes, you heard that right. This even outstretched even Intel’s amazingly high, $62.8 billion in revenue the past year.
Even with the figure, less than that of Samsung, it was a record year on its own for Intel. The revenue had seen around a 6 percent growth rate. Still, cumulatively, it wasn’t enough to beat one of the very bests. Though, admittedly, for a company who had been there on the top for 25 years, it must have been difficult for them, losing their first place.
Actually, Samsung had already carved their way to this victory by defeating Intel when it comes to quarterly revenues in the chip-making division. Now, it has stepped one step further and has got another trophy in the bag; a complete annual domination in Revenues over Intel.
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The rankings change do have a meaning behind them. It wasn’t luck which made Samsung appear at the top; It was its dedication and focus on mobile phones, and more importantly mobile phone memory chips. Without a memory chip, it’s apparent no phone could work. Therefore, Samsung exploited the need for plenty of memory chips, which Intel couldn’t. Where Intel has its chips on most of the world’s computers, the case is different with mobile phones. In the mobile phone industry, most of the phones are powered by a Samsung chip.
With the ongoing inclination towards smartphones and dropping interest in computers, it is possible that things may look very different in the future unless Intel catches up real fast in the smartphone market as well.
For the record, Samsung isn’t just chipmaking. Its total profit for the year 2017, across all its businesses amounted to a jaw-dropping KRW 53.65 trillion ($50.7 billion) on revenue of KRW 239.58 trillion, $225 billion. The q4, the final financial quarter of 2017, saw Samsung with a Revenue of KRW 65.98 trillion ($62 billion). Out of this huge amount, the net operating profit turned out to be yet another experimentally uncountable by a single hand amount of KRW 15.15 trillion ($14 billion).
Although the profit did turn out to be high, the revenue was a bit lower than the quarter previous to q4, i.e. q3. The reason which could possibly explain the drop in revenue for Samsung might be that the smartphones sales had dropped by 3.2 percent for the fourth quarter.
Since now that Samsung is on top, it would surely like to continue to be there for a while. For this, Samsung is now keen on increasing its chipset availability to Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, as well as automotive industries. To remain the fore-runner in the smartphone industry, the company is expected to roll out innovating technologies in their phones, to keep their customer base alive and healthy.
