Analysts believe chip prices are gaining momentum in the next two years

Two analysts, Bill McClean of IC Insight and Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons, believe that the global semiconductor industry will continue to grow in 2011 and 2012 before falling in 2013.

They expressed this view at the ISS Europe conference in Grenoble, France, this week and reiterated that it was due to their analysis of the global chip market demand that the ASP will rise from flat to rising.

McClean predicts that the long-term average annual growth rate of the global semiconductor industry can reach 9-10%, mainly due to the fact that chip ASP may stabilize or increase in the next few years. McClean thinks that the difference between IC Insight and Gartner and other market analysis companies is that they all believe that even if the number of chips per year demand increases by 10%, ASP will drop by 4% every year, so the future growth of the semiconductor industry is only 5-6%. .

Malcolm Penn said that if we look at ASPs in the past 10 years, there has been an inflection point, and ASP has not dropped since Q4 of 2009 and has risen.

Penn predicts that 2011 global semiconductor growth has 9%, and in December last year had forecast a growth of 6%. It believes ASP is on the rise and it is possible to reach double digits. Although Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have all announced substantial increases in investment recently, global manufacturing capacity in 2011 and 2012 is still tight, and fab investment has not been overheated. Penn added that the global semiconductor industry may have a 16% increase in 2012 and a 2% drop in 2013. It seems that the overcapacity expansion has not hit the market.