Europe-headquartered X-Fab, which merged with 1st Silicon in 2006, is the only non-Asia-Pacific pure-play foundry company in the top 14 group.

The "Big 4" (TSMC, UMC, Chartered and SMIC) have dominated the foundry market over the past five years. With sales of almost $10 billion, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) was clearly the leading foundry supplier in 2007. TSMC's sales were only 11% less than the combined foundry sales of the other companies listed in the top 14 ranking.

UMC maintained its second place ranking with sales of $3.8 billion. SMIC increased its sales 6% to take over the number three position in the ranking again (a position it lost in 1Q/08). Together, these "big four" accounted for just over two-thirds (68%) of the $24.5 billion foundry market in 2007.

TSMC, UMC, SMIC, and Chartered are pure-play foundries—companies that do not offer IC products of their own design, but instead focus on producing ICs for other companies. In 2007, pure play foundries accounted for 84% of the total foundry market.

Integrated device manufacturer (IDM) foundries accounted for 16% of the 2007 foundry market. IDM foundries are defined as those companies that offer foundry services in addition to their own ICs, such as IBM, NEC, TI and Samsung.

IC foundries have two main customers—fabless IC companies such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Xilinx, and IDMs such as Freescale, ST, and others. The success of fabless IC companies as well as the movement to more outsourcing by existing IDMs has fueled tremendous growth in IC foundry sales since 1998.