TSMC and GlobalFoundries raised their market shares in Q4 while the top five saw big reductions in orders.

Although TSMC had a QoQ drop of 1.0% in revenue to $20 billion,  its revenue market share climbed to almost 60% mainly because tier-2 and -3 foundries took a heavier hit from customers’ inventory corrections.

TSMC’s  decline in revenues from the 7/6nm nodes was mostly offset by the rise in the revenues from the 5/4nm nodes. The share of the ≤7nm nodes in TSMC’s overall revenue remained stable at 54%.

Samsung had a Q4 QoQ drop of 3.5% in foundry revenue to reach $5,391 million.

Samsung has lost a significant amount of demand for its ≤7nm nodes as Qualcomm and NVIDIA made the decision to reallocate orders for chips used in flagship hardware products.

The utilization rates of Samsung’s advanced processes are projected to remain at a low level of around 60% through 2023.  Samsung lacks the momentum to achieve a positive YoY revenue growth for this year.

UMC saw a drop in both capacity utilisation rate and wafer shipments in 4Q22, so its revenue fell by 12.7% QoQ to $2,2 billion.

UMC saw a QoQ revenue decline for both 12- and 8-inch wafer foundry services, and its 0.35/0.25μm nodes had the worse revenue performance with a QoQ decline coming to 47%.

GlobalFoundries’ revenue actually rose by 1.3% QoQ to $2,101 million thanks to the optimisation in its ASP and product mixes, as well as an increase in revenue from its non-wafer business.

GlobalFoundries was the only one among the top 10 to record a positive QoQ growth, and its revenue market share also climbed to 6.2%.

SMIC saw a drop in both wafer shipments and wafer ASP. As a result, its revenue slid by 15.0% QoQ to $1.6 billion.

The sharpest falls in SMIC’s revenue for consumer ICs.  To get its customers to raise wafer input, SMIC has been offering price concessions. However, this aggressive pricing strategy has not been particularly effective as customers are concerned about the risks associated with the US-China trade dispute.

Therefore, SMIC’s capacity utilisation rate and revenue are expected to shrink further in 1Q23.

VIS and Nexchip suffered from a downturn in the display panel industry and Nexchip dropped out of the top ten.

DB Hitek took Nexchip’s tenth place. Tower, which was in ninth place in the 3Q22 ranking, rose to 8th place with a 5.6% revenue decline.

VIS slipped to ninth place in the ranking.

HuaHong’s Q4 revenue for fell by 26.5% QoQ to €882 million. PSMC’s capacity utilization rate slid significantly for both 8- and 12-inch wafer foundry and suffered a 27.3% revenue drop to $408 million.