Our reporter Shen Cong reported: the American Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) recently released the data of the global chip market in the first quarter of 2022. The data show that the growth rate of the global chip market has slowed down significantly. In the first quarter of 2022, the global semiconductor sales volume was US $151.7 billion, with a year-on-year increase of 23% and a month on month decrease of 0.5%. In March 2022, the year-on-year growth rate of global semiconductors decreased to 23.0% from 32.4% in February.
In addition, the data show that the three-month moving average of several countries and regions has decreased, including the United States, Japan, China and China, with a decrease of 5.3%, 0.6%, 1.9% and 0.5% respectively.
It can be seen that although the global chip market is still growing steadily, the growth rate has slowed down significantly, which may mean that the global semiconductor market will usher in an inflection point.
Li Guoqiang, director of core research, said that the rapid growth of the semiconductor market in the first two years was mainly caused by the rise in chip prices and hoarding caused by the lack of core. The surge in market revenue was mainly caused by the rapid rise in prices rather than the rapid growth in quantity. Take the mobile phone market as an example. Recently, IDC, a third-party organization, announced the global shipments of smart phones in the first quarter of 2022. The data showed that the global shipments of mobile phones in that quarter were 314.1 million, a decrease of 30.6 million compared with 344.7 million in 2021, a year-on-year decrease of 8.9%, which also caused a serious decline in the demand for mobile phone chips.
"While the market demand for chips continues to decline, the COVID-19 has caused trouble to international logistics, affecting chip shipments. The previous inventory and stock up will take some time to consume, resulting in a slowdown in the growth of the semiconductor market." Li Guoqiang explained to the reporter of China Electronics News.
However, Li Guoqiang believes that such market changes are a normal cyclical change for the semiconductor industry. "The semiconductor industry is a cyclical industry. In the development process of decades, there are often market fluctuations, but generally speaking, the market is still an upward trend." Li Guoqiang said.
Bu Rixin, consultant of Tianjin Integrated Circuit Industry Association and general manager of chuangdao investment consulting, believes that the slowdown of chip growth conforms to the market law and is beneficial to the healthy development of the industry in the long run. "In recent years, the chip industry has attracted much attention, which has led to a lot of irrational investment, forming a 'foam economy', which has affected the healthy development of the industry. As time goes on, people's investment in the chip industry has become more rational, which will lead to a slowdown in the growth of the industrial market. Even so, the industry can return to the track of healthy development and squeeze out the 'foam', which is conducive to the benign development of the industry." Bu Rixin said.