Another market research organization has raised its forecast for the growth rate of the semiconductor industry in 2016 and 2017 - International Business Strategies (IBS) now thinks that the growth rate of the chip industry in 2016 is 0.2%, and that in 2017 is 4.6%.
At an industry event in January this year, IBS CEO / Senior Analyst Handel Jones originally predicted that the chip industry would decline by 1.5% this year, while IC insights, another market research institution, believed that the chip market would grow by 4% this year. Now, the two sides are almost in agreement.
IC insights recently updated its forecast for the growth rate of the chip market in 2016 to 1% and the growth rate in 2017 to 4%. In addition, analysts from the two institutions believe that the rising price of memory and the adoption of higher capacity memory in new products of China's smart phone industry are the driving forces for the growth of the overall IC market.
Jones said that the price of DRAM should rise by 20-30% in the second half of this year, offsetting the recession in the past year or so; the price of NAND flash memory has also increased, increasing by 36.2% in 2016, making the overall NAND market scale grow by 6.2%. He expects DRAM prices to decline slightly in 2017, while NAND prices will remain at $0.28-0.35.
Jones pointed out that in order to compete with leading manufacturers such as apple and Samsung, Chinese smart phone manufacturers have been upgrading their chip content in their products. For example, the Xiaomi 5S uses Qualcomm's snapdragon 821 processor and 128GB memory, and the price is only US $459.
in other markets, IBS predicts that the data center application semiconductor market will grow by 12-14% in 2016, and the growth level in 2017 will be similar; the automotive semiconductor market is expected to grow by 13.0% in 2016 and 10.5% in 2017. But Jones said: "the semiconductor market will continue to face considerable risks in 2018, as global GDP is likely to decline; but there is a high probability that the market will achieve a growth rate of 4.6% in 2017."
