iSuppli Corporation unveiled the Top 30 of semiconductor vendors for the year 2002 this week, as Silicon Strategies reports. Given that Christmas holidays are ahead, the revenue estimates should be very precise and the rankings are not likely to be changed, although the year is not yet ended. The growth of the semiconductor market in 2002 reached only 1.5% and the total sales achieved $155.35 billion.

Apparently, the highest climbers in the sales chart are DRAM manufacturers, who have been complaining about weak demand and uncertain market all this year. Even considering that numerous memory makers are not rentable, we believe they will eventually turn to profit next year when the market conditions become more favourable than this year.

Here is the table itself:

Top 30 Chip Suppliers in 2002
2002 rank	2001 rank	Supplier	2002 sales	2001 sales	% change
1	1	Intel	$23.47 billion	$23.54 billion	-0.3%
2	4	Samsung	$9.18 billion	$6.14 billion	49.5%
3	3	STMicro	$6.31 billion	$6.36 billion	-0.9%
4	5	TI	$6.20 billion	$6.05 billion	2.5%
5	2	Toshiba	$6.19 billion	$6.54 billion	-5.5%
6	8	Infineon	$5.36 billion	$4.56 billion	17.5%
7	6	NEC	$5.26 billion	$5.30 billion	-0.8%
8	7	Motorola	$4.73 billion	$4.83 billion	-2.0%
9	9	Philips	$4.36 billion	$4.41 billion	-1.1%
10	10	Hitachi	$4.05 billion	$4.24 billion	-4.6%
11	11	Mitsubishi	$3.62 billion	$3.87 billion	-6.4%
12	14	IBM	$3.39 billion	$3.56 billion	-4.7%
13	16	Matsushita	$3.28 billion	$3.01 billion	9.1%
14	13	Fujitsu	$3.24 billion	$3.73 billion	-13.3%
15	18	Micron	$3.22 billion	$2.45 billion	31.2%
16	12	AMD	$2.61 billion	$3.79 billion	-31.2%
17	19	Hynix	$2.57 billion	$2.34 billion	8.3%
18	17	Sony	$2.50 billion	$2.47 billion	1.1%
19	21	Rohm	$2.39 billion	$2.21 billion	8.3%
20	20	Sharp	$2.36 billion	$3.36 billion	0%
21	22	Sanyo	$2.10 billion	$2.03 billion	3.6%
22	15	Agere	$2.03 billion	$3.14 billion	-35.5%
23	23	Analog Devices	$1.94 billion	$1.93 billion	0.6%
24	28	Qualcomm	$1.85 billion	$1.39 billion	32.8%
25	30	nVidia	$1.80 billion	$1.29 billion	39.6%
26	24	Agilent	$1.60 billion	$1.53 billion	-3.2%
27	26	National	$1.57 billion	$1.51 billion	4.1%
28	25	LSI Logic	$1.51 billion	$1.56 billion	-3.5%
29	29	Fairchild	$1.35 billion	$1.34 billion	1.1%
30	27	Atmel	$1.21 billion	$1.48 billion	-18.5%
--	--	Other suppliers	$34.14 billion	$33.95 billion	-0.6%
--	--	TOTAL	$155.35 billion	$153.06 billion	1.5%

I would like to make a few comments in regards the Top 30:

• Intel (1) remains its leading position, however, even their sales are to drop 0.3% annually.
• The highest climber this year is Samsung (2), who managed to raise their revenues up 49.5% to $9.18 billion.
• Qualcomm (24) and NVIDIA (25) continue to sell more and more their chips and manage to outperform even those rivals, who have their own manufacturing capabilities.
• Advanced Micro Devices (16) , Fujitsu (14), Agere (22) and Atmel (30) were unlucky this year and their sales dropped really substantially. They all now expect market rebound in 2003 and plan to perform various measures in order to increase their revenues.
• The fastest growing companies this year are Samsung, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Micron (15) and Infineon (6), though both Micron and Infineon are not profitable and had to declare losses this year.