Samsung Electronics Co., South Korea's top tech firm, was relegated to second place in terms of chip sales in 2019, industry data showed Wednesday, due to the downturn in the memory chip market.

Samsung's chip business logged $52.2 billion in revenue last year, down 29.1 percent from a year earlier, according to data from US-based research firm Gartner.

The latest performance dragged Samsung down to the No. 2 spot in the global semiconductor market for the first time since 2016.

Samsung's share of the global chipmaking sector was 12.5 percent.

Intel Corp. reclaimed its position as the top global semiconductor vendor with a 15.7 market share after raking in $65.7 billion in revenue in 2019.

South Korea's SK hynix Inc. was the No. 3 player with a 5.4 percent market share and $22.3 billion in revenue last year.

Like other memory chip vendors, Samsung saw a sharp decline in revenue due to oversupply and falling prices in both the DRAM and NAND flash, the data showed. Samsung is the world's top memory chipmaker.

Samsung's memory revenue, which accounted for 82 percent of its sales, plunged 34 percent in 2019, according to Gartner.

With the slump in the memory chip market, worldwide semiconductor revenue moved down 11.9 percent on-year to $418.3 billion last year, it said.

"The memory market, which accounted for 26.7 percent of semiconductor sales in 2019, experienced a 31.5 percent decline in revenue in 2019," said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner. "Within memory, DRAM revenue declined 37.5 percent due to an oversupply that started at the end of 2018 and lasted throughout 2019." (Yonhap)