Samsung goes past Intel to become world's largest chipmaker

Samsung Electronics surpassed Intel to become the largest chipmaker in the world. The South Korean tech firm has shown its 2017 chip sales of $69 billion, which is $6 billion more than what Intel reported - $63 billion.

Samsung’s entire business reported a full-year profit of KRW 53.65 trillion ($50.7 billion) on revenue of KRW 239.58 trillion, $225 billion. For the final quarter of 2017, revenue was KRW 65.98 trillion ($62 billion) with KRW 15.15 trillion ($14 billion) in operating profit. That’s a higher profit but slightly lower revenue than the previous quarter. The company’s mobile business actually saw its take-home drop by 3.2 percent year-on-year during Q4.

Intel, whose processors are the heart of about 90 percent of the world’s computers, didn’t have a bad year. Sales grew 6 percent. Recently, Intel, along with AMD and ARM, faced severe criticism regarding their bug fixes for Meltdown and Spectre security attacks which were two of the worst chipset bugs found said to have affected nearly all the smartphones and computing devices.

The switch shows how Samsung has transformed itself from a maker of cheap television sets into a pervasive supplier of key components in smartphones and other modern computing devices.