By Gabby Chen

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce released the revenue ranking of the top ten global IC design houses in Q3 of 2022 and China’s leading image sensor maker Will Semiconductor (韦尔半导体) ranked No. 10 in the list for three consecutive quarters, TrendForce reported on December 15.

The total revenue of the global top 10 IC design houses came to US$37.38 billion in Q3 this year, showing a quarterly decline of 5.3%. The top five are Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, AMD, and MediaTek, respectively.

Will Semiconductor, founded in 2007 and based in Shanghai, posted a quarterly decline of 25.8% to $513 million in Q3. Since the company mainly offers chips for smartphones such as CMOS image sensors, TDDI solutions, and analog ICs, so its performance was affected by poor smartphone sales and pandemic disruptions.

The revenue generation momentum of the global IC design industry slowed down in the third quarter. The main factors behind this development were the Russia-Ukraine military conflict, the recent epidemic lockdowns in China, the ongoing inflation, and clients undergoing inventory corrections.

TrendForce points out that IC design houses have different product mix strategies. Therefore, demand has been steady for some of them whose product mixes are mainly composed of solutions for data centers, networking hardware, IoT devices, and automotive electronics. On the other hand, demand has weakened significantly for consumer electronics, display panels, and cryptocurrency mining machines, so the revenues from the related solutions have shrunk as well.

Hence, the revenue results of the top 10 IC design enterprises for Q3 show gains for certain product categories coexisting with losses for others. Still, the semiconductor market as a whole has recently been in slump, so more than half of the top 10 posted a revenue decline for the third quarter, said TrendForce.

Looking at the period from Q4 of 2022 to Q1 of 2023, TrendForce believes that because of the ongoing inflation, promotional activities related to the year-end holiday season will not lead to a significant rise in the overall demand for consumer electronics. Also, more time is needed to adjust inventory level for the demand side of the semiconductor market. Therefore, these two quarters are going to be very challenging for IC design companies, and the chance is high for them to post negative quarter-on-quarter revenue results, according to TrendForce.