In the second quarter of 2017, the American chip maker Nvidia outstripped its Taiwanese competitor MediaTek and became the world's third-largest "fabric-free" semiconductor manufacturer in terms of revenue. This is evidenced by a fresh rating of leading fabless companies, prepared by the analytical company TrendForce.

Specialists note that MediaTek failed to develop a successful product strategy, as a result of which the company's competitiveness in the smartphone market declined, which was the reason for the drop in its revenue. Another factor was the increased pressure from Qualcomm, which this year introduced several new Snapdragon chips and now has a more complete product range than the Taiwanese company.

According to TrendForce, MediaTek turned out to be one of two fabless companies out of the top 10 with negative sales dynamics. The second was the chipmaker Marvell, but his fall is much less pronounced. MediaTek's revenue declined by almost 20%, from 2.34 to 1.87 billion dollars, as a result of which the Taiwanese company dropped from the third to the fourth place in the ranking. In Marvell, sales sank only 0.8%, to $ 593 million, and in the top 10, it took seventh place, instead of the sixth one a year ago.

As in 2016, the first two positions in the list of companies that develop the chips, but do not have their own production facilities and entrust the production of products to "contract workers", occupied Broadcom Limited and Qualcomm. The revenue of the first grew by 17.3% year on year and reached 4.4 billion dollars, while the second sales climbed 13.1% to $ 4.05 billion.

However, the most impressive growth in the rating, by 56.7%, was shown by Nvidia. High demand for its solutions for data centers and professional graphics platforms helped to increase revenues from 1.22 to 1.9 billion dollars.

In the fifth place in the list is AMD, which increased sales by 19%, from 1.03 to 1.22 billion dollars.

Next comes the manufacturers of Xilinx chips (+ 7%, $ 615 million), Novatek (+ 3.2%, $ 381 million), Realtek (+ 1.1%, $ 321 million) and Dialog (+ 4.2%, 256 Million dollars).

Experts believe that in the third quarter of 2017, the rating of "fabricless" chipmakers will not change significantly. The report says that fabless companies that specialize in the development of smartphone chipsets and display drivers will have to work hard to improve revenue, since in their lines of business growth opportunities are limited.