Market research
Billings were 75% up on August 2003. Front-end wafer production capacity utilisation fell to a still healthy 93.1% from 95.5% in June 2004. Indeed, VLSI Research sees this figure as being "far healthier for the industry than the near-100% utilisation marks we saw in the March May time frame".
The market researcher comments: "Clearly, the industry slowed down in August, but we believe that this is a 'correction' period rather than the beginnings of a downturn. The industry is just going through a digestion phase after buying too much equipment during the first half of 2004."
Bulletin editor Mike Cooke comments: It may be different on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in Europe August is traditionally a holiday month where very little business is done.
Semico Research estimates 2004 IC sales of $218.7bn, up 31% over 2003. The analyst warns of a sagging market in 2005 as a result of increased inventories and slowing PC purchasing. Further, twelve new foundries are due to begin ramp-up next year. Eight other facilities have also been announced.
Consumer demand is not expected to pick up again until 2006. Semico also makes comparisons with 2000 - a US presidential election year, strong US GDP, a robust US economy.
North American semiconductor equipment suppliers achieved a book-to-bill ratio of 1.00 in August, according to SEMI. Orders were $1.52bn and billings $1.51bn. These represent, respectively, increases of 107% and 90% over August 2003.
The micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) microphone market is geared to grow from less than 1% of the 1.2bn microphones sold worldwide in 2003 to 20% of 1.6bn units in 2006, according to The Information Network. This represents a compounded growth rate of 206.6%. A similar growth rate is expected in the microspeaker sector with a forecast for 2004 of 50mn units.
"While technically superior to traditional microphones, MEMS device pricing needs to be comparable in order for cost-conscious handset and other consumer device manufacturers to ink supply agreements," says Dr Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network. "Our analysis shows that hourly wages are 13 times greater in the USA than in China. Memstech, based in Singapore and US-based Knowles Acoustics with two manufacturing plants in China, are clearly positioned to dominate the market. For 2004, we peg Knowles Acoustics, Sonion (Denmark), and Memstech as the top three MEMS microphone suppliers with a combined 97% share."
