Himfr on China's IC market trends

BEIJING, CHINA: Himfr.com, one of China's leading B2B search platforms with more than 30 B2B industry websites, recently reported on China's IC market trends.

In recent years, with the slow development of the global IC market, China's IC market has failed to beat issues surrounding the transfer of production capacity, the industry downturn and weakening demand, etc., resulting in a year-on-year decrease.

In 2008, with the afore-mentioned factors as well as the impact of financial crisis, the market witnessed a below 10 percent growth for the first time, the full year only achieved sales of RMB597 billion, an increase year-on-year of only 6.2 percent; seeing China's IC market growth rate on a downward spiral for five consecutive years.

The impact of the financial crisis in 2008, at the end of the third quarter, has also has serious effects on the semiconductor industry. By the cyclical development of industry factors, it is expected that the global semiconductor market in 2009 will experience a first-time decline.

Under the influence of the downturn in the global industry, China's IC market will also slow down. It can be said that in 2009, China's IC industry will be facing an unprecedented difficult year.

On the one hand, weak domestic and foreign markets will lead to sluggish domestic exports, while on the other hand, the lack of new projects to drive production, despite the RMB exchange rate bringing advantages to the industry, will not be not enough to offset the adverse effects of the market.

Based on this, Himfr.com's consultant expects that the pace of development of China's IC market in 2009 will be maintained at about 3 percent.

In the long term, if the global economy in 2010 is stable along with development, the semiconductor industry is expected to rebound. The Chinese market, Himfr.com's consultant forecasts, will continue to expand; its growth rate will gradually be smooth, and will be closer to the global semiconductor market development pace. Finally, these two market growth rates will remain basically the same.