Top ten semiconductor companies in capital spending for 14 years

ICInsights, a market research organization, expects that memory manufacturers and foundries will be the semiconductor manufacturers with the largest increase in capital expenditures for wafer manufacturing in 2014; this year, the overall semiconductor industry’s capital is estimated to be US$62.23 billion, which is 8% higher than 2013. %.

ICInsights pointed out that although the capital expenditures including memory suppliers such as SanDisk and Micron will grow strongly in 2014, the global top five industry players in the semiconductor industry’s capital expenditure scale will not change, and Samsung and Intel will remain the leading companies. Capital expenditures exceed 11 billion U.S. dollars.

The third semiconductor company is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), with annual capital expenditures slightly below US$10 billion; the combined capital expenditures of the top three semiconductor companies accounted for 52% of the total capital expenditure of the industry in 2014. The total capital expenditure of the top five semiconductor companies accounted for 66% of the total industry capital expenditure of 62.23 billion US dollars.

In 2014, nine of the top ten semiconductor companies had annual capital expenditures exceeding one billion U.S. dollars; the one billion U.S. dollars represented a threshold for sustainable development in the advanced wafer manufacturing industry, and therefore ranked tenth in capital expenditures in the world. SMIC actively wants to join the previous "billion dollar" camp. SMIC’s capital expenditure in 2014 grew by 35% from the previous year, and in 2013 this growth rate was 30%.

According to the ICInsights survey, SanDisk’s capital expenditures in 2012 and 2013 decreased by 28% and 12%, respectively; the company’s 2014 capital expenditure increased significantly by 86%, mainly to expand the advanced 3D flash memory developed in cooperation with partner Toshiba. Physical technology production capacity. Another memory company, Micron's 2014 annual capital expenditure, is estimated to have increased by more than US$1 billion, a growth rate of 58%, and foundry foundry GlobalFoundries.

In terms of consistency in the scale of capital expenditures, Samsung and Intel still performed well. Between 2012 and 2014, Samsung’s capital expenditures were estimated to reach US$35.3 billion, of which 60% was spent on memory; Intel's total capital expenditure during the same period was US$32.6 billion. Such a scale of expenditure is sufficient to support the two companies to build several advanced 12-inch wafer fabs.

In the ICInsights rankings, except for the top ten semiconductor companies with capital expenditures, other IC manufacturers, total capital expenditures in 2014 grew by a total of about 3%; these semiconductor manufacturers’ capital expenditures are slightly lower than the overall semiconductor market, most of which Industry players are beginning to adopt the fab-lite or fabless model in IC production strategy.