With the first six months of 2003 now complete, we thought it would be useful to look at how 2003 is shaping up from a business perspective. Unfortunately, not all data on the performance of the semiconductor market is immediately available, but we will analyze and comment on what is available.
Revenue
The first five months of worldwide revenue are now available from WSTS for 2003. The first five month total worldwide revenue was $59.5 billion dollars versus 53.0 billion dollars for the same period in 2002, a 12% increase although still nowhere near 2000s pace of $75.3 billion dollars.
Units
The first quarter unit volume is available from WSTS and at 84.2 billions units 2003 is very close to 2000s record unit shipments pace of 373 billion units and exceeds 2002s Q1 unit shipments by nearly 14%.
Wafers
Q1 saw starts of 13.4 million 200mm equivalent wafers versus 13.6 million for Q4 – 02. At the same time capacity fell from 16.7 million 200mm equivalent wafers to 16.2 million wafers. We expect that starts and capacity will grow as the year progresses, starts because of seasonality, and capacity because of 300mm wafer fabs ramping up. We do expect utilization to grow over the course of the year, but unless unit growth changes dramatically upward from what we are seeing, we don’t expect utilization to exceed 90%, and ASPs generally fall when utilization is below 90%.
Conclusion
From what we have seen year-to-date, we expect units to grow approximately 14% this year and utilization to climb from the current 83% to close to 90% by year end. Overall we expect continued ASP decline and revenue growth in the 12% range for the year. Although this does not represent the “normal” recovery year of the semiconductor industry of the past, it is certainly respectable performance.
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