IC Insights has provided a ranking of the industry's 10 largest IC manufacturers in terms of installed capacity. Included in the list are four from North America, two from South Korea, two from Taiwan, and one each from Europe and Japan.

As of December 2015, Samsung Electronics had the most installed wafer capacity with 2.5 million 200mm-equivalent wafers per month, according to IC Insights. That represented 15.5% of the world's total capacity and most of it used for the fabrication of DRAM and flash memory devices.

Second in line was TSMC, the world's largest pure-play foundry, with about 1.9 million wafers per month capacity, or 11.6% of total worldwide capacity, IC Insights said.

Following TSMC was memory IC company Micron Technology, which substantially increased its available capacity in recent years primarily through acquiring existing capacity from others, IC Insights indicated. With the addition of the Elpida and Rexchip fabs as well as the extra Inotera capacity, Micron first became the third-largest wafer capacity holder in the world in 2013. Micron had the sixth-largest amount of wafer capacity in 2012, and in the beginning of that year the company acquired Intel's stake in two IM Flash Technologies fabs, giving Micron access to all the capacity from those fabs.

The fourth-largest capacity holder at the end of 2015 was Toshiba with about 1.3 million in monthly wafer capacity (8.2% of total worldwide capacity), including a substantial amount of flash memory capacity for joint-investor/partner SanDisk, IC Insights said.

Rounding out the top-5 companies was another memory IC supplier SK Hynix with 1.3 million wafers/month (8.1% of total worldwide capacity), IC Insights said.

Intel's capacity declined slightly in 2015 because of the company's Fab 68 in China being taken off-line while it is converted from the production of logic chipsets to next-generation flash memory (3D NAND and XPoint), IC Insights noted.

Given the skyrocketing cost of new wafer fabs and manufacturing equipment and as more IC companies transition to a fab-lite or fabless business model, IC Insights expects that an even greater percentage of fab capacity will be in the hands of fewer suppliers through the end of the decade.