Study released on IC foundry market

USA: GSA announced the release of the fifth edition of The IC Foundry Almanac, a joint effort between GSA and IC Insights. The Almanac is a concise annual reference book for foundry segment analysis, five-year forecasts, wafer and mask set pricing information, and foundry company profile data.

The partnership combines IC Insights’ analysis of market growth and capacity trends with GSA’s analysis of wafer and mask set pricing data and IC foundry service provider profiles.

Key findings from The 2013 IC Foundry Almanac include:

* Growth of total IC foundry sales (by pure-play wafer foundries and IDMs) accelerated in 2012, with dollar volumes rising by an estimated 15 percent to a new record high of $37.4 billion after a 6 percent increase in 2011.

* Foundry demand is expected to continue growing in 2013 and 2014 with total sales increasing 10 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

* Pure-play foundry wafer process capacity available from small-to-medium suppliers outside the “Big 4” (i.e., TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC, and SMIC) represented about 24 percent of the installed pure-play capacity in 2012 compared to 28 percent in 2008.

* Data from GSA’s Q3 2012 Wafer Fabrication Pricing Survey reveals that while pricing for 300mm production CMOS wafers increased sequentially for the first time since Q4 2011, pricing for the 150mm and 200mm production CMOS wafers decreased for the period April-June 2012.