The other years that Philips failed to make the top rankings were 1993, 1994 and 1995. "All these years have one thing in common; they were all boom years for the DRAM market, with this year being a boom year for NAND," Norwood says. "Philips has always kept away from the highly volatile memory market."

There is hope for Philips and Freescale Semiconductor, the other vendor to be pushed out of the top 10, to re-enter next year.

Two existing companies in the top 10, Infineon Technologies and Advanced Micro Devices (including Spansion), plan an IPO of their memory operations in the next 12 months.

In both cases, this would result in smaller vendors placed outside the top 10, allowing Freescale and Philips to re-enter by default.

While market share results provide a good indication of which vendors did well or poorly during a year, it does not tell the whole story.