ITIS: IC industry output increases by 6.5% annually

ITRI’s IEK ITIS plan announced the outlook for the semiconductor industry in the morning in 2012. It is estimated that the Taiwan’s IC industry’s production value in 2012 was 1.659 trillion yuan, up 6.5% from 2011. Among them, the IC design industry is accompanied by global smart phones and With the trend of “low price” such as tablet PCs, the shipment of smart handheld devices will continue to grow rapidly. Plus, with the arrival of PC/NB replacement demand, the shipment rate of Ultrabook is expected to increase significantly, which will help boost the overall domestic market. IC design industry revenue performance, forecast for 2012 annual growth of 7.0%, the output value of 412.6 billion yuan. In addition, the output value of IC manufacturing is also expected to resume positive growth. It will grow 5.7% compared to 2011, reaching 824.6 billion yuan. As for Taiwan's packaging and testing plants, which will benefit from the IDM outsourcing and high-end packaging and test layout, it is estimated that the packaging and testing value of 2012 will reach 290 billion yuan and 129.7 billion yuan respectively, which represents an increase of 7.6% and 7.4% from 2011.

ITIS said that although most domestic companies in the first quarter of the IC design industry have aggressively rushed into chip business opportunities such as smart phones and tablet computers, their share is not high and their contribution to revenue growth is still small. Furthermore, as the first quarter is still a traditional off-season and the European debt crisis still exists, global PC/NB, consumer electronics and other market needs are still weak. It is estimated that the first quarter's output value was 89.4 billion yuan, and the quarterly recession was 5.5%.

In the IC manufacturing industry, the global economic situation may not be substantially improved in the short term. However, orders will gradually rise after the inventory goes down. In addition, smart phone sales performance is still good, making the foundry's output value relative to that of 2011. The fourth quarter was flat, with a slight decline of 1.6%. The IDM industry, including DRAM, is expected to grow by a small margin of 4.2% when DRAM products show a steady increase in price. Estimated output value of Taiwan's IC manufacturing industry in the first quarter reached 179.9 billion yuan, a slight drop of 0.2% from the fourth quarter of last year.

It is expected that the first quarter of LCD panel driver ICs will be expected to remain stable, while communications-based wafer packaging and test revenue performance may be relatively better than consumer electronics and PC-based wafers, but will still show a decline compared to the fourth quarter of last year. It is estimated that the output value of Taiwan's packaging and testing industry in the first quarter will reach 61.5 billion yuan and 27.5 billion yuan respectively, which is 6.4% and 6.5% lower than the fourth quarter of last year. Overall, Taiwan's IC production value in the first quarter of 2012 was 358.3 billion yuan, a 3.0% decline from the fourth quarter of 2011.