China Has 1698 Chip Design Enterprises, Ranking First Globally, But Share is Only 13%

Due to well-known reasons, recently everyone has been actively searching for domestic chip companies, trying to see how advanced their chip technology is and whether they can become Huawei's "backup options."

At the same time, some statistics show that from 2010 to 2018, the number of domestic IC design companies has grown from 582 to 1,698—an increase of threefold—indicating rapid development in China's chip industry in recent years and highlighting its growing importance.

So, what is the actual technological level of these many chip companies?

First, let’s look at the overall situation. Although China has 1,698 IC design companies—ranking first in the world—the revenue from IC design accounts for only about 13% of global revenue. This shows that while the number is large, the companies are not yet strong.

Additionally, if these 1,698 companies are divided into four categories based on annual revenue—over 100 million yuan, 50–100 million yuan, 10–50 million yuan, and below 10 million yuan—the distribution is as follows:

The number of companies in these categories is 208, 241, 406, and 843, respectively. Nearly 50% are small companies with revenues below 10 million yuan, while truly large companies are few. Only 208 companies have annual revenues exceeding 100 million yuan, indicating a pattern of quantity over strength.

If revenue and company numbers still don’t paint a clear picture, we can examine market shares in several key areas to better understand the situation.

First, in the smartphone SoC field, only Huawei's HiSilicon and Unisoc are active domestically, accounting for about 13% of the global market share. In desktop PC CPUs, the domestic share is around 1%.

As for memory chips like NAND and DRAM, domestic manufacturers collectively hold about 1% of the market. In the critical GPU (graphics card) sector for computers, the domestic share is essentially 0%.

Smartphone chips, computer CPUs, memory, storage products, and graphics card chips are among the most familiar and commonly encountered products. Their market shares are as described above, with only smartphone processors—thanks to Huawei's HiSilicon—holding a relatively higher share.

Clearly, although China has 1,698 IC design companies, their overall strength remains weak, and continued efforts are needed. Yinte Electronics is striving hard to contribute!