Huawei is the third largest chip buyer in the world, four companies in China are among the top ten.

  Recently, the latest data released by market research company Gartner shows that Huawei's semiconductor procurement expenditure exceeded 20 billion US dollars in 2018, becoming the world's third largest chip buyer, accounting for 4.4% of the global market share.

Although there is still a certain gap in procurement costs compared with the top two, from the perspective of the increase, Huawei's semiconductor procurement expenditure in 418 surged 45.2% year-on-year, far surpassing Samsung and Apple, becoming the largest increase among Top 5 companies.

In addition to Huawei, the amount of chip purchases of other Chinese companies is also increasing. A total of four Chinese companies rank among the top 10 chip buyers in the world, namely Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi and BBK (owned by Vivo and OPPO).

According to Gartner, eight of the top ten companies in 2017 remained in the top ten in 2018, with US memory chip maker Kingston Technology and China's Xiaomi replacing South Korea's LG Electronics and Japan's Sony.

Samsung and Apple are still the top two chip buyers in the world last year, with a combined market share of 17.9%. The two smartphone giants have been the top two global semiconductor buyers since 2012, with a total share of 19.5% in 2017.

Overall, thanks to the continued integration of the PC and smartphone markets, the top 10 chip buyers 2018 have a global market share of 40.2%, up from 39.4% in 2017. Gartner expects this trend to continue.

Mastinne YamaJi, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement: "As the top ten semiconductor chip buyers occupy an increasing market share, chip vendors' technology product marketers will allocate most of their resources to the former. Top 10 potential customers."