The Asia-Pacific region is particularly dominant with regard to IC marketshare in the computer and communications categories, and to a lesser extent in the consumer and industrial categories. Globally, the communications segment first surpassed the computer segment to become the largest end use market for ICs in 2013 and it is forecast to extend its marketshare lead to 2.7 points in 2015.

Europe is forecast to account for the largest share of the automotive IC market in 2015, but IC Insights expects the Asia-Pacific region will achieve top share of that segment in 2016 as China continues to account for a large and growing portion of new car shipments. That will leave only the Government/Military end use segment where Asia-Pacific does not have top IC marketshare—a condition that is forecast to hold through 2018.

In addition, in 2015, analog ICs are forecast to represent the greatest share of IC sales among automotive (43%) and industrial (50%) applications; logic devices are expected to account for the greatest share of IC sales within government (33%) and consumer (19%) systems, and MPUs (60%) are forecast to account for the greatest share of IC sales in the computer segment.