14 DAY TRIAL // The International Data Corporation believes that the semiconductor market, as a whole, will actually experience a positive evolution this year, despite recent financial disclosures on the part of the companies involved.
The forecast provided by IDC in its recent press release seems to be at odds with the financial reports from chip makers.
Intel's second quarter revenue proved enormous, true, but Advanced Micro Devices did much worse than it expected and even SanDisk posted a large revenue loss.
SanDisk saw its weak showing coming from the start, but that only goes to prove that things have already been troublesome for long enough to become predictable.
Morevoer, Advanced Micro Devices blamed part of its shipment and sales drop on an overall slowdown in CPU sales.
It is for these reasons that we find it odd that IDC can still gleam a rise in semiconductor sales for 2012. The NAND and DRAM markets must really be getting back on their feet if they will actually offset CPU demand shortcomings.
For those who want numbers, IDC said that 2012 will end with $315 billion / 259 billion Euro chip revenues, 4.6% more than in 2011. The sum will grow another 6.2% in the next four years ($335 billion / 275.5 billion Euro).
"As we forecasted earlier this year, the cyclical semiconductor downturn that started in the middle of last year reached bottom in the second quarter of 2012," said Mali Venkatesan, research manager for Semiconductors at IDC.
"Supply constraints on semiconductor products, such as smartphone applications processors and PC discrete graphics processors based on the most advanced process technologies, are easing as foundries are bringing more capacity online. Also, the semiconductor industry has recovered from the flooding in Thailand that held back the supply of hard drives and PCs. Leading-edge 22nm at Intel is ramping fast now, while foundries and memory companies are getting ready to move to 20nm technology node."