The semiconductor market as a whole has suffered the worst setback of the decade



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If you only pay attention to major news from series such as Computex, the PC market looks good. DRAM prices have dropped. The new 7 nm AMD and 10 nm Intel processors are about to generate additional gains. But under the hood, semiconductor companies have suffered a collective defeat.

Global chip sales dropped to $ 101.2 billion in the first quarter of 2019, compared with $ 116.2 billion in the first quarter of 2018. This is the largest decrease of a year in the other since the depths of the Great Recession, according to IHS Markit. Samsung, whose sales fell 34 percent from last year, suffered the largest losses in the NAND and DRAM markets. The prices of these two components have improved considerably. The memory chips, noted IHS, were at the origin of most of the fall. Remove their impact and sales dropped 4.4%. But the "depressing fall" was also caused by other factors, including falling demand in major markets.

IHS-Q12019-Markit

It is not difficult to know which companies are exposed to the NAND and DRAM markets by consulting these graphs. Intel regained first place at the top of the market thanks to the massive decline of Samsung. While everyone's earnings have dropped, Nvidia is the only other non-memory company to have been so successful. It is facing an increase in RTX stocks, a sharp decline in data center sales and a downward comparison from the previous quarter. drive the market. Nvidia's comparative financial data will improve in the second quarter and beyond, once we exit the period in which it benefits from inflated cryptographic sales.

The global chip market for computing applications dropped 16.7% in the first quarter of 2019. IHS claims that Nvidia's sales have dropped in part due to AMD's direct graphics competition in the data center. This is the first time we hear this statement. AMD has not talked much about its sales volume or its data center performance, but the overall position of the company in the data centers and the markets of IA / ML in which she wishes to enter has remained unchanged. considered weak enough. We did some research on this topic because of issues related to GPU AI and ML performance tests. The truth is that it's hard to find even people who work with AMD cards. There are many reasons, including the relative state of maturity and compatibility of OpenCL versus CUDA.

Currently, key players in the industry still expect a recovery in the second half of the year. We should soon know if there is any truth about this, because the leading economic indicators will begin to appear before we get official economic reports. While concerns over Brexit and the EU may rage around Halloween and the current trade war between China and the United States, the semiconductor market performance for the whole of 2019 is still uncertain.

In fact, the semiconductor market has many uncertainties, even at a more granular level. Qualcomm has been declared a massive monopolist and the whole of its revenue generation system could consequently be permanently changed. Nvidia is trying to convince consumers to pay a significant premium for ray tracing assistance. AMD's new 7-nm processors and graphics processors are expected to bolster its own efforts to regain market share. We wonder about Intel's 10nm efforts and its future Ice Lake processors. One wonders about the consequences of the US sales ban on Huawei's broader semiconductor market and China's reaction if any of its companies headlights is seriously damaged. How these trends and issues evolve will affect how the rest of 2019 will be built.

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