Taipei, May 10 (CNA) MediaTek Inc., one of Taiwan's leading integrated circuit designers, ranked as the world's fourth largest fabless IC supplier in 2013, up one notch from the previous year, market information advisory firm IC Insights said Saturday.
According to IC Insights, MediaTek, which specializes in smartphone chip design, enjoyed a 36 percent year-on-year increase in sales in 2013 to US$4.59 billion, surpassing U.S.-based graphics processing unit developer NVidia Corp. in the rankings.
NVidia's sales in 2013 fell 2 percent from a year earlier to US$3.90 billion, leaving the company ranked fifth in the world, the report said.
MediaTek's sales growth was the second highest in the global IC design industry, trailing only China's Spreadtrum Communications Inc., which saw sales rise 48 percent from a year earlier to US$1.07 billion.
Spreadtrum was the 14th largest fabless IC supplier in the world in 2013, up from the 18th place in 2012.
U.S.-based smartphone chip developer Qualcomm Inc. retained the title as the world's largest IC designer with US$17.21 billion in sales in 2013, up 31 percent from a year earlier. Qualcomm's sales growth was the third highest in the sector last year.
Broadcom Corp. of the U.S. was the world's second largest IC designer in 2013 with US$8.22 billion in sales, up 5 percent from a year earlier, followed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. of the U.S., which saw sales fall 2 percent to US$5.3 billion, IC Insights said.
Of IC Insight's top 25 IC design houses, 14 were headquartered in the U.S., five in Taiwan, two in China, two in Europe, one in Japan and one in Singapore.
Sales of the top 25 firms rose 12 percent to US$63.03 billion, while sales generated by the IC design sector as a whole rose 8 percent to US$77.91 billion, the statistics showed.
In addition to MediaTek, four other Taiwanese firms were ranked in the top 25. Novatek Inc. ranked 11th with US$1.40 billion in sales and MStar Semiconductor Inc. had the 13th highest sales at US$1.14 billion.
Realtek Semiconductor Corp. ranked 16th with sales of US$951 million, and Himax Semiconductor Inc. finished 19th with US$771 million in sales.
Because MediaTek brought MStar fully under its corporate umbrella in February 2014, MStar will drop out of the rankings this year.
(By Jackson Chang and Frances Huang)enditem/ls
