TOKYO — Japan’s once ailing Renesas Electronics has been blessed — unintentionally — by NXP’s recent acquisition of Freescale.

While NXP and Freescale were preoccupied with their merger and integration efforts, Renesas claims that it has quietly grown its market share in automotive microcontrollers and SoCs.

The Freescale takeover unquestionably made NXP the world’s largest automotive chip vendor in 2015. With the two companies’ combined auto chip sales at $3.9 billion, NXP held last year 14.2 percent of a $27.4 billion automotive semiconductor market, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

But look closer at the segmented levels.

Quoting Strategy Analytics’ data for the calendar year 2015, Renesas pegged its own MCU/SoC share in the automotive cockpit segment at 47 percent (in value), and in the instrument cluster at 44 percent. By its estimates, Renesas today holds the number one position in both segments globally.

Masahiro Suzuki

责任编辑：李寿鹏