This year, the world semiconductor market will fall by 28% in
value and by 26% in unit shipments, according to Future Horizons at
the company’s International Forecast Seminar 2009 (IFS2009) in
London this morning.
The company’s forecast is by far the gloomiest of all the major
analysts. Merrill Lynch’s 24% cent decline forecast is the next
gloomiest, with Citigroup, JP Morgan, Inside Chips, Broadpoint,
AmTech and Gartner Dataquest coming along behind with forecasts of
20% decline, and with Goldman Sachs and Wachovia forecasting 15%
decline.
The 22.5% fall in the market in Q408 will be followed by a 20% fall
in Q109, said Future Horizons.
“The speed of collapse in Q4 was unprecedented”, said Malcolm Penn,
CEO of Future Horizons.
Because of the speed of the decline, the hope is that the forecasts
will overshoot. But no one knows. “No one knows where the bottom
is. No one knows what’s going to happen”, said Penn.
“Texas Instruments says its growth in Q1 will be from minus 5% to
minus 30%. That means they haven’t got a clue what’s happening to
their business”, said Penn, “Q2 will be the worst. Q209 could be
minus 40% compared to Q208. Some people say minus 50%.”
In Q4 there was a crash in unit demand which will lead to
over-capacity, though Future Horizons doesn’t see over-capacity
becoming a problem. It beleivesthat capacity could get tight in the
second half of 2010.
2008 ended up as a year in which market value declined by 2.4%
while units grew by 4%. The first half of 08 was good, Q3 was
robust, but Q4 showed a collapse.
The only chance of any ASP increase this year is in memories.
“There’s little chance of ASP increase in 2009 other than in
memory”, said Penn, “simply because they’re losing so much money it
can’t continue.”
The good news is that the industry is entering the recession in
good shape with no sign of over-capacity. The industry started to
cut back on capacity expansion a year before the recession
hit.
The foundry industry was lucky in that it cut back on capex to push
up wafer prices, then warned the industry that prices would not
decline so fast over a process node as they had done. Then, of
course, came the credit crunch with demand falling off a cliff. So
the foundries were lucky. Now there’s no more talk from them about
prices staying stable, according to Penn, now they want orders to
fill their foundries.
Post-2009, the Future Horizons forecast is for rapid growth: a 15%
rise in 2010; a 28% increase in 2011; an 18 per cent improvement in
2012 slowing to 3% growth in 2013. “2014 is the start of the next
cyclical recovery”, said Penn.
The best that could be said about this year was: “It’s very severe
but it’s not 2001”, said Penn, “the markets are global and are
twice as big as they were in 2000.”