The year 2020 was an eventful one, and for most firms was a time of falling revenues and widespread layoffs. The semiconductor industry, however, saw ample growth. The stay-at-home and work-from-home lifestyle meant that more and more people were working, studying, and playing, and let’s face it, you can’t do either without a PC if you’re home alone. While foundries like TSMC, SMIC, and Samsung saw ample growth, the largest profits were raked in by the likes of NVIDIA and AMD.
NVIDIA was the front-runner with a massive increase of 52% in its yearly revenue, going from $10,125 million in 2019 to $15,412 for the FY2020. AMD, on the other hand, banking on the success of the Ryzen 3000 and 5000 CPUs, paired with the launch of the next-gen consoles saw its revenue surge by 45% (from $6,731 to $9,763), making it the second most successful fabless chipmaker of 2020. Other notable names include Qualcomm and MediaTek with an annual growth of 34% and 37%, respectively. Broadcom had a rough year with the YoY revenue being mostly flat. Realtek and Novtek enjoyed moderate growth of 30-35% while Xilinx saw a small drop in yearly revenues. With the Xilinx merger in its final stages, AMD will be neck-to-neck against NVIDIA in terms of the overall revenue from 2022.
