Another No-Growth Year for the Semiconductor Industry
Staff -- Semiconductor International, 7/1/1998
Another No-Growth Year for the Semiconductor Industry
In-Stat Corp. (Scottsdale, Ariz.) predicts another year of zero sales growth for the semiconductor industry in 1998. According to In-Stat, the March WSTS/SIA numbers confirms the extreme weakness of sales levels year-to-date. A company spokesman noted that the first quarter worldwide semiconductor sales have not been down this much sequentially since 1985. That, coupled with a decline in units brought about by softer demand from end-use sectors, more capacity than can be used, and still-declining ASPs does not augur a bright outlook for chip sales this year. The market research and information organization sees moderate growth potential for a few product categories such as certain ASICs, linear parts and portions of the MCU segment. Additionally, some markets will show growth, specifically Europe and select regions within the Asia Pacific.
Although growth will take place in specific segments and markets, Japan continues to slide as a semiconductor-consuming market. Additionally, sales levels in the Americas are low enough that extremely strong quarterly growth would be required for the remainder of the year to achieve annual growth over 1997. In-Stat believes that total MOS Memory will decline an estimated 13% again this year, lowering the dollar value of that segment to about $25 billion. This level is down considerably from the peak of $53.5 billion achieved in 1995, when DRAMs were in short supply.
According to In-Stat, the DRAM market is down 20% and growing slowly. Bit growth is lower this year at 60% than the 95% seen in 1997. There is still considerable capacity in 16Mb and 64Mb DRAMs. Since capacity continues to exceed demand, the DRAM market is viewed as soft for the balance of 1998.
