Semiconductors & ICs

Samsung Electronics is the improbable triumph of a company that began in 1938 as a trading house selling dried fish, noodles, and produce — and whose founder, Lee Byung-chul, pivoted into electronics in 1969, decades after the chaebol's grocery origins. The bet was staggering: in the 1970s, Samsung started making black-and-white TVs in a country most of the world considered a poor backwater. Fifty years later, it is the world's largest maker of smartphones, memory chips, and TVs. The empire's core is semiconductors: Samsung is the world's largest memory chip maker (DRAM and NAND), with a near-duopoly over advanced memory alongside SK Hynix, and its foundry business makes chips for other companies. Its mobile division's Galaxy line competes head-to-head with Apple for the global smartphone crown, and its consumer electronics division dominates TVs and home appliances. The company also runs one of the world's largest smartphone factories and the largest semiconductor fabs, in Pyeongtaek. Headquartered in Suwon, South Korea, with about 270,000 employees and annual revenue near US$200 billion, Samsung Electronics is the flagship of the Samsung Group, which generates about a fifth of South Korea's GDP. Its challenges — memory price cycles, catching TSMC in leading-edge foundry, and Chinese competition — are the challenges of Korea itself, but its dominance in memory remains the bedrock of the digital world.

When the AI boom suddenly needed memory chips that could feed data to GPUs faster than ever, one company was ready: SK Hynix. The South Korean firm began in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics, changed hands to the SK Group in 2012, and is now the world's #2 memory chip maker — and the dominant supplier of HBM (high bandwidth memory), the advanced chips stacked inside Nvidia's AI accelerators. The HBM story explains the company's leap: each HBM module stacks up to a dozen DRAM dies with through-silicon vias, an extraordinarily hard manufacturing feat that only SK Hynix and a handful of rivals can do at volume. Its HBM3E products are the performance bottleneck-breakers for AI training, and the company has sold out its HBM capacity years in advance. Based in Icheon with about 31,000 employees, SK Hynix also produces mainstream DRAM, NAND flash, and SSD products, with annual revenue around ₩33 trillion. Its U.S. investment — a $3.9 billion advanced packaging plant in Indiana — reflects a new strategy: putting its most valuable manufacturing close to its most important customers.

Texas Instruments has a claim few companies can make: it put the first transistor radio in consumers' hands (1954) and the first integrated circuit on the market (1958, thanks to engineer Jack Kilby, who won the Nobel Prize for it). That invention, the chip, launched the digital age — and TI built its fortune on it, becoming one of the world's most enduring semiconductor companies. Today TI is the world's largest maker of analog chips — the thousands of everyday functions like voltage regulation, signal conversion, and power management that sit inside virtually every electronic device — and embedded processors for industrial and automotive use. Its products are boring in the best way: a car contains hundreds of TI chips, and a data center's power supplies depend on them. The company's 300mm wafer fabs in Texas are among the most advanced analog manufacturing facilities on earth. With about 34,000 employees and annual revenue near US$18 billion, TI is famous for its 'no layoffs' culture (a policy it has largely kept for decades) and for manufacturing discipline — it builds most of its own chips, unlike many rivals who outsource. For engineers, TI's datasheets and design tools are the industry's default reference — the company that defined the chip industry's vocabulary.

In 1987 Morris Chang made a bet that the semiconductor industry thought was crazy: build a company that only manufactures chips for other companies, selling no products under its own name. Four decades later, that company — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — fabricates more than half of the world's advanced chips, and the 'pure-play foundry' model it invented has become the backbone of the entire industry. TSMC's customers are the names on the chips: Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and hundreds of fabless designers who bring only designs and leave with wafers. Its technology lead comes from relentless process-node progression — 5nm, 4nm, 3nm, and beyond — plus a willingness to spend: annual capital expenditure of US$30 billion or more keeps its fabs ahead of every rival. The company's first fab outside Taiwan, in Arizona, began production in 2024, part of a global expansion driven by geopolitical demand. With roughly 76,000 employees and revenue near US$70 billion, TSMC's practical importance is hard to overstate: virtually every advanced chip in every smartphone, server, and AI accelerator on earth passes through its cleanrooms. For electronics buyers, TSMC is less a supplier than an industry utility — the one foundry the rest of the world quietly depends on.

Infineon's roots run through the entire history of European semiconductors: it began as the semiconductor division of Siemens, was spun off as an independent company in 1999, and is now the world's leading supplier of automotive semiconductors — the chips that manage everything from engine control to airbags to EV power trains. On average, a modern car contains more than a hundred Infineon chips. The company's technical edge is power: Infineon is the global leader in power semiconductors — the devices that switch and convert electrical power — including IGBTs and silicon carbide (SiC) modules that are essential to electric vehicles, solar inverters, wind turbines, and data center power supplies. It also makes the security chips in passports and payment cards, and radar and MEMS sensors for cars and consumer devices. With about 58,000 employees and annual revenue near €16 billion, Infineon has ridden the EV and renewable energy booms to record results, and its new SiC factories in Malaysia and Austria are among the largest power semiconductor investments in Europe. For the auto industry, Infineon is a critical dependency — the kind of supplier whose chips are designed into platforms years before production, and whose capacity constraints can ripple through the entire car market.

Every advanced chip on earth — in every smartphone, laptop, and AI data center — is made with a machine that only one company builds. ASML, based in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, is the world's sole supplier of EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography systems, the most complex production machines ever made: each one weighs 180 tonnes, costs over US$150 million, and contains more than 100,000 parts shipped from suppliers across the globe. The company's journey was a 30-year gamble: from its 1984 founding as a Philips/ASMI joint venture, through near-bankruptcy in the 1990s, to its bet on EUV technology in the 2000s — a bet that required synchronizing an entire industry and that finally paid off when EUV entered volume production around 2019. Today ASML holds a monopoly position that no competitor has meaningfully challenged, with a backlog worth tens of billions of euros. With about 42,000 employees and annual revenue near €28 billion, ASML's machines print the patterns that define chip generations: the most advanced logic chips from TSMC, Samsung, and Intel all require ASML EUV. For the semiconductor industry, ASML is not a supplier to negotiate with — it is the bottleneck every other company plans around.

Shin-Etsu is the rare company that dominates two industries most people have never heard of. Founded in 1926 in the Shin-Etsu region of Japan, it is the world's largest producer of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) — the plastic in pipes, window frames, and cable insulation — and also the world's largest supplier of silicon wafers, the thin discs on which every semiconductor chip is built. Roughly one in every three wafers in the world comes from Shin-Etsu. The silicon wafer business is the crown jewel: making a perfect single-crystal silicon ingot and slicing it into flawless wafers is one of manufacturing's hardest tasks, and Shin-Etsu's yields and quality make it the indispensable supplier to TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. Its PVC business, meanwhile, is built on proprietary technologies that give it cost advantages competitors have spent decades trying to match. The company also makes synthetic quartz, rare earth magnets, and photoresist materials. With about 25,000 employees and annual revenue near ¥2.4 trillion, Shin-Etsu is famous for its extraordinarily conservative balance sheet — it holds massive cash reserves and avoids debt, yet consistently posts some of the highest profit margins in the chemical industry. For the semiconductor world, Shin-Etsu is the quiet monopoly underneath every chip that gets made.

Intel was founded in 1968 by two of the 'Traitorous Eight' — Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who had left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor, then left Fairchild to found Intel. Their first products were memory chips, but the 1971 invention of the microprocessor — the Intel 4004, a chip that put a computer's central processing unit on a single slice of silicon — changed the course of human technology. The x86 architecture that followed has powered virtually every PC ever built. Intel's modern business spans three fronts: client computing (the Core processors inside most of the world's PCs and laptops), data center and AI (the Xeon server processors that run cloud data centers, now facing intense competition from GPU-based AI accelerators), and foundry services (manufacturing chips for other companies, a new bet against TSMC). Its factories in the US, Ireland, Israel, and Malaysia are among the most advanced manufacturing facilities on earth. With about 125,000 employees and annual revenue near US$54 billion, Intel is in the middle of the most difficult transition in its history: losing its manufacturing lead to TSMC, missing the AI boom, and now betting its future on catching up in process technology and reclaiming a role in AI silicon. For the tech industry, Intel remains the symbol of American semiconductor manufacturing — and its comeback attempt is being watched as a national project.

STMicroelectronics is Europe's answer to the semiconductor giants of Asia and America — and it is literally a marriage of two nations: created in 1987 by the merger of Italy's SGS Microelettronica and France's Thomson Semiconducteurs, with the two governments as anchor shareholders. The 'ST' in its name stands for the two founding companies, and its dual headquarters in Geneva reflects that cross-border DNA. ST's strength is in chips for the physical world rather than pure computing: it is a global leader in microcontrollers (its STM32 family is the industry's most popular line of embedded processors, used in everything from factory robots to drones), power semiconductors (silicon carbide and GaN for electric vehicles), and sensors (the accelerometers and gyroscopes inside smartphones, plus MEMS microphones). Its automotive business supplies the silicon carbide modules that boost EV range and efficiency — a business that has boomed with the EV revolution. With about 50,000 employees and annual revenue near US$17 billion, ST operates massive wafer fabs in France, Italy, and Singapore, plus assembly plants in China, Malaysia, and the Philippines. For the European auto industry, ST is the indispensable local chip supplier — the company whose microcontrollers and power devices are designed into the continent's cars, and whose capacity has become a matter of industrial policy.

SMIC — Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation — was founded in 2000 in Shanghai by Richard Chang, a veteran of Taiwan's TSMC, with a mission: to build a world-class chip foundry on the Chinese mainland. Two decades later, it is China's largest and most advanced semiconductor manufacturer, the country's best hope for chip self-sufficiency — and the most sanctioned company in the US-China tech war. The company makes chips for fabless customers across China and the world: logic chips for phones and IoT devices, power management chips, display drivers, image sensors, and increasingly advanced processors using its own 14nm and 7nm-class technologies. Its factories in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Shenzhen run tens of thousands of wafer starts per month, and its expansion plans — four new fabs announced with state backing — represent China's largest semiconductor investment program. With about 18,000 employees and annual revenue near US$6 billion, SMIC has been blocked by US export controls from buying the most advanced equipment, forcing it to develop alternative processes and extend the life of older technology nodes. For the global chip industry, SMIC is the strategic question: can China's flagship foundry keep advancing without the tools its competitors use — or will sanctions permanently cap its technology ceiling?

MediaTek is one of the world's largest fabless semiconductor companies and the biggest supplier of smartphone system-on-chip (SoC) processors by volume, founded in 1997 in Hsinchu, Taiwan, as a spin-off of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). The company employs about 20,000 people and generates annual revenue of roughly US$14 billion, designing chips for smartphones, smart TVs, Wi-Fi routers, and automotive systems.\n\nMediaTek's Dimensity series powers a large share of the world's Android smartphones — from budget devices to flagship models competing with Qualcomm's Snapdragon — while its Kompanio and Filogic lines serve Chromebooks and networking gear. The company is a leader in connectivity silicon, shipping more Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G modem chips than almost any competitor, and has made aggressive moves into automotive with its Dimensity Auto platform and into AI with its server and edge inference chips. Its manufacturing is outsourced to TSMC, making it one of the foundry's largest customers.\n\nFor electronics manufacturers, MediaTek is a high-volume, cost-effective silicon partner with complete reference designs that shorten time-to-market for phones, TVs, and IoT devices, and its design-win model creates steady demand for packaging, testing, and component supply chains across Asia.

ASE Technology Holding is the world's largest semiconductor packaging and testing company (OSAT), formed in 2018 through the combination of Taiwan's ASE Group and Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL). Headquartered in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the group employs about 70,000 people and generates annual revenue of roughly US$19 billion, packaging and testing chips for virtually every major semiconductor company.\n\nASE's core business transforms bare silicon wafers into finished, tested chips: wire bonding, flip-chip, system-in-package (SiP), and advanced 2.5D/3D packaging that integrates multiple dies into a single module. This 'back-end' manufacturing is increasingly the performance bottleneck of the AI era — advanced packaging like ASE's FOCoS and fan-out technologies enables the high-bandwidth memory stacks used in AI accelerators. The group operates plants in Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Japan, and the United States, and has invested heavily in automotive-grade packaging through its subsidiary, serving the growing chip content of electric vehicles.\n\nFor the semiconductor supply chain, ASE is the essential partner between chip designers and end products: its scale in packaging, testing, and materials procurement (lead frames, substrates, mold compounds) makes it one of the largest buyers of semiconductor materials in Asia and a critical node in electronics manufacturing worldwide.