Worldwide Highlights

02/01/1999

Worldwide Highlights

November equipment book-to-bill climbs. Orders at North American semiconductor equipment and materials companies again showed solid month-to-month gains in November, rising 29% to $805.0 million (see table). Shipments also ticked up 15% to $962.9 million, for a resulting book-to-bill ratio of 0.84, according to SEMI. Nevertheless, bookings are 51% below November1997 levels, while the three-month average shipments are down some 41%. A return to strong growth will likely not come before chipmakers move beyond today`s aggressive shrinking of feature sizes and begin adding new capacity.

November chip sales down. The worldwide IC industry posted a book-to-bill ratio of 1.01 in November, down from a revised 1.03 in October, with a modest 3% month-to-month rise in orders exceeded by a rise in shipments, according to market researcher VLSI Research in San Jose. Fab capacity utilization ticked down in November to 78.9% from October`s revised 80.4%.

Sales growth forecast. Global semiconductor sales are expected to climb 9.1% to $133.4 billion in 1999, after suffering an estimated 10.9% decline this year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). SIA said strength in memory chips, microprocessors, and digital signal processors will spur greater growth in 2000 and 2001, with those years seeing 15.2% and 18.2% increases, respectively. Industry observers note that the 1999 forecast assumes that the economies of the US, Japan, Asia, and Russia stay essentially the same as 1998.