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Semiconductor Market Falls 12.4% in 2009
Photo: oskay/Flickr (CC)
Shane McGlaun
November 25, 2009
The global semiconductor market was
hard hit by the poor global economy. Nearly all of the largest makers
of microprocessors are reporting losses for the previous quarter.
The latest numbers
were released this week by market research firm iSuppli and
predict that the revenue for the microprocessor market will plummet
12.4% in 2009. That is a loss of $32 billion compared to 2008.
Despite the grim outlook for the year, things were not as bad as they
could have been for the industry. The decline for the year was
predicted to be over 20%.
iSuppli’s Dale ford said, “There
was little room for anything but pessimism after the industry
suffered a sequential revenue decline of 21.4 percent in the fourth
quarter of 2008 and an 18 percent drop in the first quarter of 2009.
However, semiconductor sales rebounded smartly after that. … This
strong rebound means 2009 will be much less painful than had been
feared earlier in the year.”
The only semiconductor
supplier in the top ten to post a profit was second place Samsung.
What has helped Samsung post a profit is its memory business. Samsung
is tops in both the NAND and DRAM memory market. These markets are
doing much better than the microprocessor market at this time.
Ford
said, “Samsung is benefiting from its dominance in the memory
market, whose performance was dramatically better than the
semiconductor industry as a whole.”
According to
iSuppli’s numbers, Qualcomm’s revenue will remain flat thanks to its
baseband chip market for cell phones.
AMD is looking at a revenue decline of 7.6% reports eWeek. Of the top ten suppliers of microprocessors, Sony posted the largest decline with 32.8% revenue decline for the year. Intel still has a massive lead in the computer CPU market with an 80.6% share.
_© 2009, DailyTech
