Oct – Moving further up into positive y-y growth
Quick Note

Global semiconductor sales as reported by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) /
WSTS continued to rise m-m in October 2023, moving higher into y-y growth territory. Last
week we extended our chip industry projections into 2025 (Tech 2024 Outlook Anchor ).
We expect the cyclical chip recovery to gather momentum over the next several months.
We think that restocking following the chip inventory correction of 2022/2023, a recovery in
most major electronics end markets including traditional servers, PCs and smartphones,
and the secular AI trend will drive double-digit percentage growth in the global chip
industry in 2024 and again in 2025.
The three-month rolling average of semiconductor sales rose 3.9% m-m in
October, following increases of 1.9% m-m in September, 1.9% m-m in August
and 2.3% m-m in July (Fig. 2 ). Total semiconductor sales moved further into positive
y-y growth territory, rising 4.9% y-y in October, following growth of 0.3 y-y in
September and a decline of 7.0% y-y in August (Fig. 3 ).
Growth was driven by the logic, processor (MOS Micro) and memory segments,
each up y-y in the 5-15% range. We think that demand for chips for AI, PCs and
smartphones are driving this growth.
Analog remained down by several percentage. We continue to expect the
analog segment to trail the overall chip cycle in terms of timing of bottoming
and subsequent recovery.
○
○
•
We think there is good visibility that the chip cycle will continue to swing upward through
the rest of 4Q23F and through 1H24F, as the semiconductor industry moves past the
inventory correction that ran from mid-2022 to mid-2023. In our view, it is likely that global
semiconductor sales as a whole will show a significantly-better-than-seasonal pattern in
the first few months of 2024F.