Top 10 semiconductor buyers lower chip spending by 7.6% in 2022: Report

The top 10 global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have lowered their chip spending by 7.6 per cent and accounted for 37.2 per cent of the total market in 2022, a new report said on Monday.

According to Gartner, most of the top 10 semiconductor customers are major PC and smartphone OEMs.

"As a result, a sharp drop in consumer demand for PCs and smartphones prevented the top OEMs from increasing unit production and shipments," Masatsune Yamaji, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said.

"The zero-Covid policy in China also caused serious material shortages and short-term disruptions to the electronics supply chain. A lingering semiconductor shortage in the automotive, networking and industrial electronics markets, raised chip average selling prices (ASPs) and accelerated semiconductor revenue increases in these markets," he added.

Moreover, the report said that all the top ten companies in 2021 remained in 2022, with Apple and Samsung Electronics retaining the top two spots.

Only Samsung Electronics and Sony increased their chip spending in 2022.

Apple remained at the top of the semiconductor spending customer ranking for the fourth year in a row.

Due to the ongoing shift to in-house-designed application processors, the company reduced spending on computing microprocessor units (MPUs) by 11.7 per cent.

However, Apple increased spending on non-memory chips by 2.8 per cent.

Further, the report mentioned that Samsung Electronics increased chip spending by 2.2 per cent and retained the second spot.

With approximately 25 per cent of semiconductor sales in 2022 coming from memory, the device category had the worst performance, with a 10 per cent decrease in revenue due to lower prices in the second half of the year, said the report.

"The top 10 OEMs accounted for 49.2 per cent of memory spend and consequently saw a significant decline in memory spending," said Yamaji.