Gartner: has a semiconductor market of US $583.5 billion last year and Samsung regained its sales crown.

The global semiconductor market grew 25.1% in 2021, totaling $583.5 billion, breaking the $500 billion mark for the first time, according to industry data released Wednesday by Gartner, a US research firm.

In terms of company ranking, due to the strong improvement of Samsung Electronics' memory business, the company returned to the world's highest-income chipmaker after two years. According to data released by Gartner, Samsung's revenue reached $75.95 billion in 2021, up 31.6% from a year earlier, with a market share of 13%. (the ranking is based on the preliminary results of Gartner, excluding contract manufacturers such as TSMC.)

According to the report, large network cloud providers have increased the deployment of servers to meet the needs of telecommuting, learning and entertainment, while personal computers and mobile devices have also boosted memory requirements, which are once again the best-performing chip category.

Revenue from memory chips in 2021 increased by $42.1 billion over 2020, equivalent to 33.8% of the overall growth. Among memory chips, dynamic random access memory ((DRAM)) performed best, with revenue growth of 40.4 per cent.

Thanks to strong demand for memory, Samsung's memory business sales jumped 34.2%, making it the top contributor to the company's list, with memory-based companies SK Hynix and Micron ranked third and fourth.

Throughout the company rankings, almost all of the top 10 chipmakers recorded double-digit growth, but Intel grew by only 0.5% awkwardly.

Gartner wrote that Intel faced fierce competition in its strong server CPU, making the US chipmaker's revenue growth the slowest among the top 25 companies, which is the main reason why the company was easily overtaken by Samsung Electronics in second place.

Intel's direct competitor in processors, AMD, recorded a 64.4% growth, rising from 14th to 10th. In view of the take-off of 5G smartphones, Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek, which focus on communication chips, have all seen significant revenue growth, with Qualcomm and MediaTek up more than 50%.

Andrew Norwood, vice president of research at Gartner, wrote: "with the rebound of the global economy in 2021, there is a shortage of the entire semiconductor supply chain. The resulting strong demand and higher logistics and raw material prices have driven up the average selling price of semiconductors. (ASP), has contributed to overall revenue growth in 2021. "