According to a recent report released by market research firm Gartner, semiconductor industry revenue in 2022 was $601.7 billion, up only 1.1% from $595 billion in 2021.

This is a far cry from last year's growth rate of 25%, which also shows that chip makers are in a bad predicament.

The storage market is the worst-performing semiconductor segment, down 10% from the previous year, and worse could come in 2023, according to the report.

Last year got off to a good start for many chipmakers, as demand rebounded once the economy began to emerge from the pandemic, with some companies finding the need to increase production to meet component shortages.

& ldquo;2022 at the beginning of the year, there was a shortage of many semiconductor devices, resulting in longer delivery times and higher prices, resulting in reduced production of electronic equipment in many end markets. As a result, OEM began to hedge against shortages by hoarding chip inventory, said Andrew Norwood, vice president analyst at ldquo;Gartner.

But as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out and inflation and high interest rates began to dampen spending, semiconductor companies began to see demand evaporate as many OEM decided to run out of inventory before buying new supplies.

Norwood said: & ldquo; by the second half of 2022, the global economy began to slow under the pressure of high inflation, higher interest rates, higher energy costs and Chinese mainland's continued zero-clearing policy of COVID-19, which affected many global supply chain manufacturers.

According to Gartner's ranking of global semiconductor companies, the largest companies seem to perform best. Among them, the total revenue of the top 25 semiconductor suppliers increased by 2.8% in 2022, accounting for 77.5% of the market share.%。

Samsung Electronics remains at the top of the list of the world's top 10 semiconductor manufacturers, although its revenue actually fell 10 per cent to $65.585 billion from $73.197 billion in 2021. According to Gartner, this is mainly due to the decline in demand for DRAM and NAND.

Intel ranked second with $58.373 billion in revenue, but sales fell 19.5% year-on-year due to falling demand in the consumer PC market and fierce competition in its core x86 processor business.

SK Hynix ranked third with $36.229 billion, but last year's decline was much smaller, at 2.6 per cent.

Qualcomm ranked fourth with 28.3% growth, reaching $34.748 billion.

In seventh place was AMD, with $23.285 billion, but with the highest year-on-year growth rate of 42.9%.

At the same time, although memory chips accounted for about 25 per cent of semiconductor sales in 2022, they suffered the biggest decline, down 10 per cent from the previous year.

Gartner said that by mid-2022, the storage market had shown signs of a sharp collapse in demand, as OEM began to deplete the storage inventory they had held in response to stronger demand.

The situation has deteriorated to the point that most storage companies have announced cuts in capital spending in 2023, and some have cut wafer production to reduce inventory levels and try to rebalance the market.

Last year, Gartner predicted that overall semiconductor growth would be negative in 2023 and begin to recover next year.

Last year, Gartner predicted that overall semiconductor growth would be negative in 2023 and begin to recover next year.

At the same time, non-memory chip revenue actually grew by 5.3% in 2022, but the situation varies from market segment to market segment. The strongest growth was in analog chips, up 19% from a year earlier, followed by discrete components, up 15% from 2021.

Gartner said the growth in analog and discrete devices was driven by strong demand in the automotive and industrial end markets, thanks to growth trends in automotive electrification, industrial automation and energy transformation.