Intel’s 25-year dominance as the world’s largest chipset seller has ended.
Intel, the largest chipmaking company based in America has been defeated by South Korean electronics giant Samsung in its own play. Samsung has announced record-breaking $50 billion profit for the year 2017, and fourth quarter record with $14.1 billion earned largely from selling marked-up components, rather than Galaxies.
The components include memory modules, displays, and processors, but it’s the chip business that made it rain for Samsung in 2017. The company has not even itself highlighted the fact in the annual report that the Samsung made $69 billion of revenue from the chipset manufacturing, while the former champion in this domain Intel (also known as Chipzilla), earned $63 billion revenue during the same period.
This is a huge shift in the silicon chipset business made by the South Korean giant, no matter how you slice it. Even though Intel’s focus is on the more upgraded and profitable x86 processors, Samsung managed to throw its weight around by making everything from computer memory to mobile Exynos processors. The company is a few steps ahead of the competition in terms of technology and production capacities.
Looking forward to 2018, Samsung intends to increase its chipset focus on cloud services, AI and automotive. On the smartphone front, where its name is best known among consumers, the company said it plans to adopt “cutting-edge technologies” like foldable displays. Samsung said also that it would continue to develop its smart services with a focus on its Bixby assistant and upcoming 5G technologies.
