On February 14, IC Insights, a market research agency, released the monthly output rankings of wafer factories in various countries and regions. Taiwan ranked first, Korea ranked second, Japan ranked third, the United States ranked fourth, and China ranked fifth.

According to the report, Taiwan's wafer factory has a monthly capacity of 4.126 million wafers of about 8 inches, accounting for 21.8% of the world's total, ranking first.

Taiwan's wafer factory capacity ranked the first in the world in 2015. In 2018, Taiwan's wafer factory capacity accounted for 21.8% of the world's total, up 0.5 percentage points from 21.3% in 2017, and continued to rank the first in the world, slightly higher than South Korea's 21.3% (4.033 million tablets per month).

According to last year's IC Insights report, TSMC's revenue in 2017 reached $32.2 billion, more than five times higher than that of the second-ranked supplier. Last year, TSMC accounted for nearly 52% of the global wafer manufacturing market.

In addition, Taiwan has the third largest wafer generation factory in the world, Lianhua Electronics, and the sixth largest wafer generation factory in the world, Lijing Technology. In 2017, the combined OEM revenue of TSMC, Hybrid Power and Power Crystal accounted for about 62% of the world's total.

According to the global wafer capacity report from 2019 to 2023, TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix occupy a large share of wafer factory capacity in Taiwan and South Korea, and are the global capacity leaders. TSMC accounted for 67% of Taiwan's production capacity, while Samsung and SK Hynix accounted for 94% of Korea's IC wafer production at the end of 2018.

In addition, according to IC Insights, Japan's wafer factories have a monthly output of about 3.68 million wafers of about 8 inches, accounting for 16.8% of the world's share, ranking third; the US wafer factories have a monthly output of about 2.426 million wafers of about 8 inches, with a global share of 12.8%, ranking fourth. Meguiar acquired Alpida a few years ago and other recent major changes in Japan's manufacturing strategy, including Panasonic's break-up of some of its wafer factories into separate companies, meant that the first two companies (Toshiba and Risa) accounted for 62% of the country's Wafer Factory capacity.

China's mainland wafer factories have a monthly output of 2.361 million wafers of about 8 inches, accounting for 12.5% of the world's wafers, ranking fifth, up 1.7 percentage points from 10.8% in 2017, which is the region with the largest increase. In 2018, there was a lot of heated discussion about Chinese start-ups and their new wafer factories. Meanwhile, other global companies expanded their manufacturing operations in mainland China last year, so the share of mainland China's production is expected to increase significantly.