According to market research firm Gartner, the revenue of the global chip foundry industry will increase by 31% in 2021 to $100.2 billion, driving the growth of the entire semiconductor industry. The agency believes that the increase in foundry sales was mainly due to an 11.5% increase in the average selling price of silicon wafers and an 18% increase in unit shipments.

Gartner's report also shows that the global semiconductor industry's total revenue in 2021 will increase by 26% to $595 billion. Among them, the revenue of Foundry factories in Taiwan and South Korea benefited from strong demand from Fabless manufacturers such as AMD and MediaTek.

The capacity utilization rate of the global chip foundry industry will exceed 95% in 2021, with particularly strong demand for 8-inch wafers for power management ICs, display drivers and fingerprint sensors. Gartner said the shortage of 8-inch wafers could last "for a long time," as fab expansion is limited by a lack of appropriate semiconductor production equipment.

Additionally, head foundry fabs doubled their capex over the next few years to record highs, encouraged by long-term agreements and up-front payments with customers.

However, TSMC's market share will drop by 3 percentage points to 57% in 2021 due to slower price increases than other competitors. It is worth noting that TSMC has a market share of more than 90% on 7nm and 5nm node chips, and the main customers of these chips are Apple, AMD and MediaTek.

TSMC's latest revenue data shows that the company will produce more than a quarter of the world's logic chips in 2021, mainly application processors, CPUs, GPUs and FPGA chips for customers such as Apple, AMD, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Marvell. product.

At the same time, the revenue growth rates of Samsung Foundry, Powerchip Semiconductor and Hua Hong Grace in 2021 exceeded that of TSMC, all reaching more than 60% (TSMC's revenue YoY% in 2021 was 24.4%).

Samsung's main customers are Qualcomm, Nvidia and Tesla, the latter three relying on Samsung's 8nm and 14nm chips. Samsung previously took orders for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 series, and Nvidia's Ampere and GeForce chips. After TSMC announced a small price increase, Samsung also raised its wafer prices by 20% at the end of 2021, according to a Gartner report.

Third-ranked UMC (UMC) announced that it had achieved "best performance" on its traditional 28nm and more mature process nodes, Gartner said. In 2021, UMC's wafer prices rose 14%. UMC was the first company to develop a 28nm high-voltage process technology for AMOLED display drivers, which helped the company win an order from Samsung.

The fourth-ranked GlobalFoundries focuses on technologies such as RF-SOI, SiGe and FD-SOI. The company's 12-inch fabs in Malta and Germany focus on FinFETs and FD-SOI, while its relatively older 8-inch fabs in the US and Singapore provide SiGe and BCD technologies. Due to the severe global automotive chip shortage last year, GlobalFoundries has established important partnerships with customers in the automotive industry such as Ford, BMW and Bosch.

During the U.S.-China trade war, the U.S. government announced that it would cut off the supply of chips to Huawei. Before the chip ban officially took effect, Huawei increased its chip inventory to the level of 6 months. This move has promoted the rapid development of the foundry industry.

In addition, the global outbreak of the new crown pneumonia has accelerated the shift of super large technology companies such as Amazon and Google to work from home, and has also prompted them to increase investment in data center businesses to cope with the growing demand for online activities.