According to figures released today the semiconductor DTAM plummeted 24 per cent, a hark back to some dire times in the 1980s.
The sector took a real beating early in the year before, if not climbing off the canvas, at least showing signs of coming round in the final quarter of 2009 which was just,- just! - 10.4 per cent down against the same quarter in 2008.
The stark statistics come from DMASS (Distributors and Manufacturers Association of Semiconductor Specialists), and its chairman Georg Steinberger comments, "The worst effects of the crisis seem to be over, for the moment, and our industry returns to its normal cyclical behaviour, from buying freeze directly to allocation. The current booking situation suggests a healthy growth for at least the first half of 2010. And it seems that the current market swing is not entirely driven by inventory correction. Combined with the fact that we are comparing against a very bad year, by all standards, 2010 is set for double-digit growth.”
The good guys in the last quarter of last year were Iberia which nipped a 0.4 per cent upturn on 2008, the bad guys were the UK and the rest of Europe which posted a dismal 17.7 per cent decline on Q4 2008.
Germany, Europe's biggest in the sector fell 9.6 per cent to 314m Euro. Italy fared worse by declining 11.2 per cent to 104m Europe. The litany of gloom continues with France's fall of 15.8 per cent to 78m Euro and the UK's precipitous decline valued the market at 83m Euro.
In East Europe the market dropped 6.1 per cent to 111m Euro and in the Nordic countries, the 87m Euro market represented an 11;5 per cent fall.
Adds Georg Steinberger: “A quarterly view does not really reflect the overall situation of one specific country. Over the entire year all regions and countries suffered almost likewise, regardless of the electronics industry structure there. The only country with a less than 10% decline over the year was
The only major product group that suffered less than 20 per cent decline over the entire 2009 was Memories. While Analog, Opto and Programmable Logic all ended up slightly below the average decline for the entire year, Power, MOS Micro and Other Logic landed around the -28 per cent mark. Flash memories (-1.7 per cent), LEDs (-11.6 per cent), DSPs (-15.8 per cent) and RF Discrete (-18.7 per cent) were the products with the least decline over 2009 while DRAM managed 1.5 per cent growth.
“The past product development does not really tell us anything of an industry trend, apart from the fact that EPROMs seem to become a dying technology altogether. The current booking hype goes across all segments and technologies, from commodities to 32-Bit MCUs,” Steinberger concludes.
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