Huawei’s fabless chip designing unit HiSilicon did something that no Chinese company ever accomplished before. It managed to make the list of the top-ten companies worldwide ranked by semiconductor sales. For the first quarter, the unit raked in $2.67 billion in gross allowing it to move up five places from its ranking during the same quarter last year when it had $1.74 billion in semiconductor revenue. The year-over-year gain amounted to a 54% rise.

Huawei and top foundry TSMC need each other

The numbers show how important TSMC is to Huawei and vice versa. Not too many foundries are equipped to produce 5nm chips and besides TSMC, Samsung is the only other one planning on releasing 5nm components this year. Intel has talked about regaining the process leadership from TSMC and Sammy. Intel currently produces the 10nm Ice Lake-U mobile processor. Several months ago Intel CEO Bob Swan said, “We are accelerating the pace of process node introductions and moving back to a two to two-and-a-half-year cadence. Our process technology and design engineering teams are working closely to ease process design complexity and balance schedule, performance, power, and cost.”

Speaking of Intel, it was the largest semiconductor company in the world during the first quarter with $19.5 billion in sales, up 23% from the same quarter last year. Samsung was second as a 15% hike took its semiconductor revenue to $14.8 billion during the three months ended in March. After HiSilicon, third-place went to TSMC and its 45% rise in semiconductor revenue year-over-year. TSMC took in $10.3 billion in revenue during the quarter.

South Korea based SK Hynix, the chipmaker responsible for the RAM memory chips used on the iPhone, reported no change in Q1 revenue which was slightly over $6 billion. That was good enough for fourth place. Fifth place Micron had the largest year-over-year revenue decline in the top ten  (-12%) which makes sense once you know that Huawei is its biggest customer. Qualcomm, whose chips are also made by TSMC, had revenue of $4.1 billion in Q1 for an 8% hike. That placed the designer of Snapdragon chips seventh in the top ten after Broadcom.

The remaining names on the list include Nvidia (also making the list for the first time) and Texas Instruments. As we’ve already pointed out, HiSilicon was tenth. The companies on the top ten reported 16% growth in aggregate first-quarter revenue to $72.5 billion. That was more than twice the 7% growth rate that the top ten reported during last year’s first-quarter.