Semiconductor Industry Update Strong Growth and Future Outlook
TapTechNews August 20th news, the semiconductor industry organization SEMI released the <2024 Second Quarter Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry Monitoring Report> which was jointly compiled with the analysis agency TechInsights yesterday local time.
The report pointed out that the total global integrated circuit sales achieved a strong year-on-year increase of 27% in the second quarter of this year. The report expects that the IC sales in the third quarter will soar by 29% (TapTechNews note: this is the year-on-year increase according to the bar chart below) and break the historical extreme set in 2021.
In addition, the improvement of demand also promoted a 2.6% year-on-year decrease in the IC inventory level in the first half of 2024.
In terms of capital expenditure in the semiconductor industry, although the expenditure scale in the second quarter of 2024 decreased by 9.8% compared to the same period in 2023, it is still higher than that in the first quarter of 2024.
With the continuous growth of demand for AI chips and the rapid application of HBM memory, it is expected that the capital expenditure of the semiconductor industry will turn positive from this quarter, and the storage-related part will achieve a 16% quarter-on-quarter increase in the third quarter, while the non-storage expenditure quarter-on-quarter increase will be 6%.
In other data, the report mentioned that the total global wafer fab capacity in the second quarter is 40.5 million 12-inch wafer equivalents, and it is expected to increase by 1.6% in the third quarter.
Among them, the wafer foundry and logic-related capacity achieved a 2% increase in the second quarter of 2024, and the increase in the third quarter is expected to reach 1.9%; and driven by the strong demand for HBM and the improvement of pricing, the storage wafer capacity will increase by 1.1% in this quarter, which is higher than 0.7% in the previous quarter.
In addition, the sales of electronic products in the first half of 2024 decreased by 0.8% due to seasonal factors and weak consumer demand. The sales of electronic products in the third quarter of this year are expected to rebound, with year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter increases of 4% and 9% respectively.
SEMI's chief analyst, Clark Tseng, said:
Although the semiconductor capital expenditure in the first half of this year is moderate, we expect that a positive trend will begin to emerge in the third quarter of 2024 driven by storage capital expenditure.
The strong demand for AI chips and HBM memory is driving the performance of all links in the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem.
TechInsights' market analysis director, Boris Metodiev, said:
As the market prepares for the surge in 2025, the entire semiconductor supply chain is recovering this year.
AI will definitely continue to drive high-value integrated circuits into the m arket, and at the same time support the capital expenditure required for the capacity expansion of AI chips, especially HBM.
With the recovery of consumer demand and the push of new technologies such as AI to the edge, the unit output and revenue will recover and provide support for a wider range of semiconductor manufacturing.