Growth for semiconductor equipment sales in 2011 but down in 2012

USA: The current SEMI Year-end Consensus Forecast anticipates growth of 4.7 percent for this year (to $41.8 billion) and a moderate decline of 10.8 percent for 2012 for worldwide sales of new semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

Wafer processing equipment, the largest product segment by dollar value, is expected to increase 9.3 percent in 2011 to set a record at $32.7 billion. The forecast predicts that the market for assembly and packaging equipment will decline by 12.5 percent to $3.4 billion in 2011. The market for semiconductor test equipment is forecasted to decline by 10.3 percent, reaching $3.7 billion this year.

Growth is expected for four regions in 2011; Europe (66.9 percent increase over 2010), North America (53 percent), Japan (31.2 percent), and China (2.3 percent). Forecasted spending increases in 2011 will be particularly dramatic in North America and Europe owing to Intel’s and GlobalFoundries’ aggressive CAPEX plans.

Additional projects driving the North American market include IBM Microelectronics investments in Building 323, while Micron/IM Flash Lehi and Manassas fabs and Samsung’s Austin’s fabs are all equipping this year. These investments will make the new equipment market in North America the largest with $8.8 billion, followed by Taiwan ($8.1 billion), South Korea ($8 billion), and Japan ($5.8 billion). Taiwan, South Korea, and Rest of World experienced negative growth rates in 2011.

In 2012, only South Korea is expected to have positive growth (7.5 percent). In 2013, the market is expected to rebound for all regions except South Korea, due to high growth in 2012.

The following results are given in terms of market size in billions of US dollars.Source: SEMI, USA.

Last year’s record fab equipment spending plays out into increased production capacity for 2012 and 2013— where we estimate growth at 6 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Note that the increase in capacity is coming primarily from technological upgrades, not new fabs.

Japan still remains the largest chip manufacturing region in terms of capacity with about 23 percent of the worldwide total. The majority of that capacity is for logic at 37 percent, followed closely by memory at 34 percent.

By 2013, we expect that memory will dominate worldwide fab capacity at 38 percent, compared to 19 percent in 2000. This is primarily at the expense of MPU/Logic capacity. Foundry capacity is only expected to increase by 7 percent — to a total 32 percent of global fab capacity, by 2013.

Source: SEMI, USA.