Chip shop slump coming

THE SEMICONDUCTOR equipment market is set for a fall, according to global industry outfit, SEMI, predicting a 28 per cent slump after 2007 growth of 5.7 per cent.

SEMI reckons the semiconductor equipment market will only reach $30.91 billion in 2008, and expects it to fall a further 21 per cent in 2009, before pulling itself up by its bootstraps and posting 31 per cent growth in 2010.

Stanley T Myers, president and CEO of SEMI pessimistically noted, "Worldwide semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales have declined to levels last seen in 2003 and we anticipate a second year of double-digit decline in 2009".

Breaking it down, even wafer processing equipment, which is the largest product segment by dollar value, is expected to plummet 28 per cent to $22.95 billion this year. The market for assembly and packaging equipment is also widely expected to take a dive, estimated at about 24 per cent to $2.16 billion in 2008. And with Semiconductor equipment taking a hit, so is equipment to test semiconductors, with analysts expecting a 27 per cent decline to $3.69 billion in that particular market too.

(Courtesy of SEMI)

In Asia, it’s a good news/bad news scenario for Japan, where the semiconductor equipment market is predicted to drop by about 20 per cent, but the country will still be doing better than Taiwan, thereby becoming the leading region for sales of new equipment.

Despite being cheap as chips, China will also see sales of new equipment sink like a supermodel in quicksand, with a decline of 35 per cent. South Korea will see a drop of 28 per cent and the rest of the world can expect 10 per cent slumps on average. µ