Huawei dropped out of the top 25 chip manufacturers

The 2021 revenue of HiSilicon, the semiconductor division of Huawei, plummeted and is no longer among the top 25 largest chip companies.

"HiSilicon revenue is down 81%, from $8.2 billion in 2020 to $1.5 billion in 2021," Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner, said in the April 16 report. "This is a result of the bans imposed on parent company Huawei ."

Huawei's chip business went down quickly after the US bans. Photo: Huawei

According to Norwood, the latest results mark a "significant change" in the ranking of global semiconductor suppliers since May 2019 when Huawei was placed on the US entity list. In 2020, HiSilicon is still among the top chip companies .

The fact that HiSilicon dropped out of the top 25 also had a significant impact on the Chinese semiconductor industry. According to Gartner, the country's overall semiconductor market share globally fell from 6.7% in 2020 to 6.5% last year.

Financial results released at the end of March showed that Huawei's 2021 revenue fell 29% to 636.8 billion yuan ($99.8 billion), but profit increased 76% to 113.7 billion yuan. currency (17.8 billion USD). The company's revenue is mainly from core activities such as 5G, renewable energy...

HiSilicon is responsible for designing the Kirin, Gigahome, Kunpeng, Balong and Ascend chips used by Huawei in its electronic products. Similar to other companies like Apple, the company only does the design, while the production will be done by other units, mainly TSMC. However, due to US sanctions, HiSilicon can no longer cooperate with large chip foundries as they all rely on American technology to a certain extent.

Huawei has not yet fired any HiSilicon employees after nearly three years of the US embargo, but these employees are now receiving great attention from other chip design companies. According to SCMP , some are said to have resigned to work at Zeku, Oppo 's chip design unit .

In terms of chip market share in 2021, Gartner's data shows that Samsung has reclaimed the leading position from Intel. Last year, the Korean company's revenue reached 73.2 billion USD, accounting for 12.3% of the global market share, while the US chip company ranked second with 72.5 billion USD, accounting for 12.2% of the market share. .

The US 'strangled' Huawei's chip business 90
Huawei builds chip factory in Wuhan 21
Huawei ranks third in chip market 22
Huawei leads the global telecommunications market 90
Huawei will only produce half of smartphones in 2021