Jacobo Carrasco Heres, IHS: Texas Instruments is Tops in Industrial Electronics Semiconductor Market

November 9, 2011

Texas Instruments (TI) in 2010 was the undisputed champion of a critical electronics market that generates copious growth—but garners little attention: the industrial electronics semiconductor space.

Leveraging its broad participation in a variety of market segments, TI in 2010 earned $1.79 billion in industrial electronics semiconductor revenue, giving it a 6.5 percent market share.

“While much attention is heaped on sexier semiconductor markets such as a wireless, computers and consumer electronics, the industrial segment actually outgrew all these areas in 2010,” noted Jacobo Carrasco Heres, industrial electronics analyst at IHS. “In fact, industrial electronics in 2010 was the second-fastest growing semiconductor market after automotive. Dallas-based TI managed to lead in this area last year partly because of its robust footprint worldwide and its broad participation in virtually every industrial electronics market segment—from automation to medical, to energy and military. The company also benefitted from its strong product offerings in analog, microcontrollers and digital signal processing.”

The completion of the acquisition of National Semiconductor in the third quarter this year is expected to further reinforce TI’s hold on the pinnacle when rankings are reassessed at the end of 2011.

Industrious Industrial Chips
Industrial electronics spans a variety of application fields in an extremely broad range, including such disparate areas as manufacturing and process automation, test and measurement, medical electronics, building and home control, energy generation and distribution, and military and civil aerospace. Semiconductors counted as part of the industrial electronics umbrella include discretes, optical, sensors and actuators, and microcontrollers, as well as integrated circuits in the analog, microcomponents, logic and memory sectors.

Revenue for semiconductors used in the industrial electronics market grew an impressive 35 percent in 2010. And while the market was clearly in retreat during the second half of this year, positive growth is still projected for all of 2011, with brisk double-digit expansion anticipated until 2017.

Industrial Giants
The leading five companies in the industrial electronics semiconductor arena in 2010 had revenues ranging between $1 billion and $2 billion, and the Top 10 suppliers enjoyed combined revenues of $11.45 billion—roughly 42 percent of a market worth $27.46 billion.

Occupying the No. 2 slot in 2010 after TI was Italian-French entity STMicroelectronics, with $1.59 billion in industrial electronics semiconductor revenue and a 5.8 percent market share. While TI ranked highly in several segments, it failed to nab the top spot in any single submarket. In comparison, STMicroelectronics held the top spot in areas such as manufacturing process and automation, and was also No. 1 in the medical arena.

Third place last year went to German firm Infineon Technologies, with $1.42 billion in revenue and 5.2 percent of the market. Infineon was the top supplier in the energy segment.

In fourth place was Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, California, with $1.21 billion—its industrial electronics revenue component just making up 3 percent of the giant chipmaker’s total semiconductor revenue of $40.40 billion. Intel accounted for 4.4 percent of the industrial electronics market.

Close behind Intel was another American firm, Massachusetts-based Analog Devices Inc. With 4.3 percent market share, ADI had revenue in 2010 amounting to $1.19 billion.

Rounding out the Top 10, in descending order, were Renesas Electronics Corp. of Japan, in sixth place; Toshiba Corp., also of Japan, in seventh; NXP Semiconductors Inc. of the Netherlands, in eighth; California-based Maxim Integrated Products, in ninth; and Mitsubishi Corp. of Japan, in 10th.