Samsung Electronics and Apple remained the top semiconductor buyers in 2015, representing 17.7 percent of the market, according to Gartner, Inc. Samsung Electronics and Apple together consumed $59.0 billion of semiconductors in 2015, an increase of $0.8 billion from 2014.

"Samsung Electronics and Apple have topped the semiconductor consumption table for five consecutive years, but the growth of Samsung's design total available market (TAM) was lower than the total semiconductor market in 2014 and 2015," said Masatsune Yamaji, principal research analyst at Gartner. "Samsung and Lenovo, the fastest-growing companies over the last five years, decreased their design TAM in 2015 and the risk of revenue declines from the strongest customers for semiconductor chip vendors is increasing."

The top 10 companies bought $123 billion of semiconductors, to account for 36.9 percent of semiconductor chip vendors' worldwide revenue in 2015. This was down from 37.9 percent in 2014, which was worse than the semiconductor industry's global total decrease of 1.9 percent.

Preliminary Ranking of Top 10 Companies by Semiconductor Design TAM, Worldwide, 2015 (Millions of Dollars)

2014 Ranking	2015 Ranking	Company	2014	2015	Growth (%) 2014-2015	2015 Market Share (%)
1	1	Samsung Electronics	30,989	29,867	-3.6	8.9
2	2	Apple	27,177	29,116	7.1	8.7
4	3	Lenovo	13,743	13,329	-3.0	4.0
5	4	Dell	10,880	10,686	-1.8	3.2
3	5	HP Inc.	15,616	8,634	-44.7	2.6
7	6	Huawei	6,040	7,020	16.2	2.1
6	7	Sony	7,631	6,947	-9.0	2.1
-	8	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	0	6,473	-	1.9
9	9	LG Electronics	5,743	5,533	-3.7	1.7
8	10	Cisco Systems	5,817	5,430	-6.7	1.6
		Others	216,695	210,684	-2.8	63.1
		Total	340,331	333,718	-1.9	100.0

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

The market decline happened partly because HP spun off its enterprise business, which bumped Toshiba from the top 10. Toshiba's design TAM in 2015 was $4.6 billion, so the top 10 companies in 2014 (including HP Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Toshiba) represented $127.6 billion of semiconductors in 2015 on a design TAM basis, to account for 38.2 percent of semiconductor chip vendors' worldwide revenue.