MUMBAI, INDIA: A  majority of eight companies  out of the top 10 companies accounted for a third of semiconductor demand in 2010, says Gartner, a provider of  IT research and advisory services.

The research report added that the leaders accounted for $104.3 billion revenue, which rose 33.7 per cent year or year, or $26.3 billion. It was measured on Gartner’s design total available market, or TAM, basis.

The major growth drivers in 2010 were mobile PCs, smartphones and LCD TVs. PC vendors such as HP, Apple, Dell and Lenovo increased their design TAM greatly in 2010.

Samsung Electronics succeeded in riding the trend of the smartphone boom, while Nokia struggled. Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic enjoyed market growth from flat-panel TVs, which saw them accelerate their design TAM, the release added.

Gartner singled out Apple as leading “the new competitive landscape of the IT and electronics industry,” by providing vertically integrated software, hardware and supporting services and outsourcing production to electronics manufacturing service providers, typically in Asia. Additionally, its products cover the range of leading design TAM successes, such as smartphones, media players and media tablets; Gartner described the latter category as the “new killer application.”

“Semiconductor device vendors should closely monitor the changing competition structure of the target market,” said Masatsune Yamaji, senior research analyst at Gartner. “Judging from purchasing TAM, Asia/Pacific, and especially China, offers the greatest opportunities in most of the device and application market segments,”  Yamaji said.

He added that it will be difficult for most of the semiconductor device vendors, to achieve the full design-win benefit without establishing a strong distribution network in Asia/Pacific.

“Semiconductor device vendors must pay attention not just to the design and purchasing TAM by company, but also to that by region. This is the key to avoiding inappropriate sales resource allocation,” Yamaji said.