We’re happy to share this month’s extract of Future Horizons April report on the semiconductor market. Continue reading to learn more about the market’s current outlook.
Executive Overview
2019, pre-Covid, saw the IC sector shrink, whilst Opto boomed and Discretes remained flat, reversing positions in the first half of 2020, with Opto in decline whilst IC growth recovered, with all sectors back in step by the second half of 2020.
The reverse situation seems to be happening right now, with ICs in full growth mode, whilst Discretes and Opto are in decline. We believe this trend will run its course over the coming months with all sectors back in step by the second half of this year … unfortunately all being more likely in decline..
Market Update
At our January Industry Update webinar, we presented our official forecast for 2024, namely a 16 percent growth in value, with the Bull and Bear scenarios being plus 20 and plus 12 percent respectively.
Our concern at that time was that this growth rate was inflated by ASPs that were being measured against 2023’s severely collapsed values, and as such the ‘recovery’ was a statistical quirk of the math and not genuine market growth.
Regular readers of our reports will know we have constantly counselled of this danger and of our belief that, without a recovery in unit sales, this dollar ‘growth’ will one day evaporate in a puff of smoke. It looks like that day is now coming into sight.
Given the worsening IC unit shipment situation, with no end yet in sight to this route, it is looking increasingly likely that our forecast concerns were valid.
Other than Memory, which is now in a genuine recovery phase, sadly all the other IC product segments, along with Discretes and Opto, are not doing as well, with the monthly annualized growth rates all on a downward trend.
We commented last month that our 3 percent growth assumption for Q1-2024 was starting to look optimistic. With the first two months’ data now in, our fears are confirmed … Q1 will now shrink.
Future Horizons will be hosting a spring update webinar on May 7th 2024, which will present an updated forecast for 2024. For more information and to review previous webinars, click here.
For any further details, please reach out to the Future Horizons team.