Europe’s glorious semiconductor past doesn’t exist

“Europe’s current share of the global semiconductor market sits at around 10 percent, down from a heady 44 percent in 1990,” Intel’s Pat Gelsinger wrote in the Financial Times almost a year ago. If you’re trying to convince public authorities to subsidize the fabs you’d like to build, it’s doesn’t hurt to point out that Europe’s semiconductor industry has suffered a terrible decline. As it turns out, however, that never happened.

Gelsinger’s figures trace back to a 2020 report from the Boston Consulting Group and the Semiconductor Industry Association, which shows a graph depicting global semiconductor manufacturing capacity by region as a function of time. Europe’s market share starts at 44 percent in 1990 and decreases over time to 9 percent in 2020, in line with Gelsinger’s statement. Many media outlets, too, have been citing these figures.