14 DAY TRIAL // Companies or analysts may look at CPUs, DRAM and NAND chips individually when trying to figure out how well they sold, but SIA decided to look at the semiconductor market as a whole.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), as its name implies, keeps track of all developments on the worldwide chip market.
Turns out that this is exactly what it did, its newest press release dealing with the financial progress during the first quarter of 2011.
Apparently, the economic recovery and newfound interest in NAND chips and smartphone and tablet SoC (system-on-chip) devices had a positive effect.
More specifically, sales for the January-March period amounted to $75.8 billion, showing an increase of 8.6 percent over the same period of 2009, when the figure was $69.8 billion.
Also, compared to the fourth quarter of 2010, the figure was 0.4% higher, quite the feat knowing that the holiday season and the usual slowdown of the first parts of any year should have enabled a different situation.
SIA's press release also took into account the month of March alone, finding that the sequential rise was of 2.5%, from $24.7 billion to $25.3 billion.
As for the month of March, 2010, the industry had sales of $23.2 billion, basically 8.6% less than those of this year's same month.
“At the close of the first quarter of this year we are very encouraged by the performance of the global and domestic semiconductor industry,” said Brian Toohey, president, Semiconductor Industry Association.
As far as the future is concerned, SIA predicts that growth will be stronger than expected because of high business and consumer demand for electronic products and in spite of the disaster that rocked Japan on March 11.
“Now more than ever, it’s clear that the semiconductor industry is a force driving the U.S. economy forward and out of the recent recession.”