According to Digitimes Research's surveys and analyses, second-quarter 2022 smartphone application processor (AP) shipments to China-based vendors amounted to 181 million units, increasing 1.7% from the prior quarter but decreasing 17.1% from the prior year mainly due to China's weakening economy as well as the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and rising inflation continuingly taking a toll on consumer spending.
The global wafer foundry industry embraced brisk market demand and raked in a total of exceeding US$100 billion in 2021 revenues, representing an on-year growth of 26%.
DIGITIMES Research believes Intel investing in advanced process technologies and restarting the foundry services business are strategies that are able to complement each other.
According to Digitimes Research's surveys and analyses, first-quarter 2022 smartphone application processor (AP) shipments to China-based vendors amounted to 178 million units, increasing 4% from the prior quarter but decreasing 16% from the prior year as Xiaomi, Oppo and Transsion ramped up inventory with their efforts to expand into Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America generating results.
The top-4 Taiwan-based foundries - TSMC, UMC, PSMC and VIS - together generated an aggregated total revenue of US$19 billion in fourth-quarter 2021, up 6% from a quarter ago, taking their combined whole-year 2021 revenue to top US$68 billion, up 26% from a year ago.
Hybrid bonding and other new advanced assembly techniques widely used for smartphone application processors (AP) and high-performance computing (HPC) chips will continue to expand advanced packaging technologies.
Silicon (Si) semiconductor with widespread use is close to reaching the physical limits of Moore's Law and is thus being replaced by wide bandgap semiconductors of third-generation semiconductors in a growing number of applications.
Fourth-quarter 2021 smartphone AP shipments to China-based vendors amounted to 171.2 million units, plunging 30.8% from the prior quarter mainly as China-based vendors faced the situation where some components were in worse shortage than the others, on top of weak 5G phone demand and a mismatch between AP supply and demand.
Digitimes Research believes 2021 were a fruitful year for the global foundry industry thanks to strong order momentum and is optimistic about its outlook going into 2022.
