Databeans updates 2011 semiconductor forecast

RENO, USA: Databeans has just released its year 2011 outlook for the entire semiconductor industry, and is projecting the market to reach just under $321.8 billion in total worldwide sales this year, as the electronics industry and semiconductor industry both continue their ongoing recovery.

Still, this growth of 8 percent from 2010 totals is far more modest compared to the 31 percent jump the industry witnessed last year over 2009 totals. Growth is considered tentative as pockets of high unemployment, tight credit availability, and weak housing markets remain in many areas of the globe, causing lingering sluggish consumer demand. Databeans predicts that the entire industry will remain healthy, barring a dip in 2012, and will grow at a 9 percent CAGR until 2015.

Databeans expects that the broad category of Optoelectronics will be one of the highest growth product segments with 10 percent growth between 2010 and 2011, which will cause the market to reach $25.2 billion, and the industry’s strongest CAGR of 12 percent.

In particular, a continual increase in the prevalence of devices, such as smartphones, digital cameras, and HDTVs that require solid state lighting and image sensors is expected to provide a major boost to optoelectronics sales during the period. Meanwhile, the rapidly emerging solid-state general lighting market for residential and commercial segments will drive significant demand for Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), one of the highest growth potential Optoelectronics products.

Analog is expected to be another high growth industry over the next several years growing 10 percent to $46.8 billion in 2011 and expanding at another 10 percent annually on average over the period. In particular, power management ICs, signal processing components, and interface products are identified as some of the highest growth semiconductors within the Analog segment.

The trend of 'green' products and an ever increasing demand for energy efficiency in digital electronic systems will continue to ensure that this remains a high growth market over the long-term.

Memory, while not as dynamic as it was in 2010, in which sales improved 52 percent over 2009 thanks to considerable pent up demand and very favorable pricing, will still maintain its status as a high growth industry, with an increase of 8 percent to $73.6 billion in global sales. As PC demand improves, DRAM sales in particular will continue to grow steadily. Meanwhile, NAND Flash is expected to be in high demand for 2011 thanks to surging smartphone and tablet PC growth.

Logic will remain the largest individual semiconductor product segment with $84.2 billion in global revenue projected for 2011, an increase of 9 percent from 2010 totals. Portable electronics are primarily driving this growth, as are industrial and medical segments, in addition to demands for improvements in low active and static power consumption, higher integration, smaller footprint packages, increased design security, and field upgradability.

Finally, other individual product categories of note include Discretes which will grow 7 percent to $21.2 billion in 2011 sales, Microprocessors which will grow 8 percent to $42.4 billion in 2011 sales, and Microcontrollers which will grow 5 percent to $15.3 billion in global 2011 sales. Sensors and DSP will remain the smallest two categories in 2011, with $7 billion and $6.1 billion in revenue, respectively.

Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue Forecast by ProductSource: Databeans