Thursday, June 3, 2010

Metrology/inspection equipment market outperforms again in 2009

Dr, Robert N. Castellano, The Information Network, USA

NEW TRIPOLI, USA: The Semiconductor Metrology/Inspection Equipment Market has outperformed the rest of the overall semiconductor front-end wafer processing equipment market for a second consecutive year, according to the report Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control in VLSI Manufacturing.

Back on May 12, 2009, we issued a note to our readers entitled “Consolidation Still Rampant in Semiconductor Metrology/Inspection Equipment Market.”

We had issued a forecast for the industry stating “For 2009, we project the metrology/inspection market to experience a drop in revenues of 33 percent, in tandem with the total front-end market, which will drop 41 percent.”

We were pretty close. According to a bottoms-up analysis of the process control vendors, in 2009, metrology/inspection revenues decreased 37.6 percent, while the total front-end equipment sector decreased 42 percent.

Another noteworthy thing – we didn’t change the forecast for the whole year, unlike other companies that seem to change forecast monthly. That’s the value of our experience since The Information Network was formed in 1985 AND the value of our Leading Indicators, which are supplied to our subscribers of our Annual Subscription Service.

Getting back to the report details, KLA-Tencor was the market leader in 2009 for the entire process control market with a 44 percent share of the market, well ahead of Hitachi and Applied Materials -- who have 14.5 percent and 11.9 percent share each, respectively.

And what about 2010? You guessed it. It will be better than 2009!

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