TSMC sales by customer base: Apple dominates, AMD wins, Huawei sawed off

TSMC has over 460 customers, but only a few make up the majority of its sales. Details illuminate this a little more precisely, even if they are only approximate, as TSMC does not reveal any definitive figures in order to protect its customers. So nothing comes after Apple for a long time, but then quite a lot.

Apple alone has accounted for around a quarter of TSMC's sales for years. Since sales are steadily increasing, both manufacturers benefit: Apple can sell even more smartphones, TSMC builds the chips required for them. And profits are gushing at both companies.

The crash of the former number 2 is interesting: Huawei with its chip division HiSilicon. More than every seventh chip from the factories was booked once for Huawei in terms of sales, which was promptly set to zero by the US sanctions against the manufacturer. What is surprising, however, is that in 2020 at least almost 13 percent of TSMC's sales were accounted for by Huawei - here the manufacturer packed many millions of chips into the warehouse before the lock took effect.

TSMC Customer Share of Revenues 2019 – 2021
	2019	2020	2021
Apple	24.04%	24.2%	25.4%
Hi-Silicon	15.0%	12.8%	0.0%
Qualcomm	6.1%	9.8%	7.6%
NVIDIA	7.6%	7.7%	5.8%
Broadcom	7.7%	7.6%	8.1%
AMD	4.0%	7.3%	9.2%
Intel	5.2%	6.0%	7.2%
MediaTek	4.3%	5.9%	8.2%
Source: The Information Network [Website]

AMD was one of the biggest beneficiaries last year, but Qualcomm has secured an even bigger chunk, according to the numbers. This year, however, this will partly be released again, as Qualcomm wants to have more production at Samsung - just like Nvidia. Here AMD accesses it again, but so does Intel. With a 7.2 percent share of TSMC's sales, Intel does not even rank very far behind AMD, which has every product from the console to the server chip manufactured by TSMC and should ultimately account for 9.2 percent of sales. Only in 2020 did AMD even overtake Intel in terms of sales at TSMC.

The biggest leap forward will be awarded to MediaTek in 2021. If the forecasts prove to be correct, they will rise to become the third most important manufacturer at TSMC, thus replacing Qualcomm.