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The association said on Friday that worldwide sales of semiconductors totalled USD10.01 billion in February, essentially unchanged over January as a drop in European and Japanese sales cancelled out gains in the United States and Asia-Pacific. The numbers are in line with the projections of the association, which has forecast slightly stronger sales for the current quarter and accelerating growth in the second half of 2002.
The news that semiconductor sales figures had met expectations helped the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index make solid gains on Monday, rising 2.47 percent. Semiconductor giant Intel rose 2.5 percent while AMD was up 0.3 percent.
The Semiconductor Industry Association's president George Scalise said the rise in sales in some territories was thanks to strong consumer spending for mobile phones, DVD's and digital cameras. "Although business investment has yet to pick up, consumer confidence and inventory replenishing continue to rise, driving the early stages of the overall recovery," he said in a statement.
During February sales in the Americas and Asia Pacific markets rose two percent and 0.3 percent respectively to USD2.52 billion and USD3.41 billion. Japanese sales fell by 1.2 percent to USD1.99 billion while European sales fell 1.5 percent to USD2.1 billion. The association's numbers are tabulated by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organisation, which represents approximately 66 companies.
Despite the mild gains in US and Asia Pacific sales, the numbers published on Friday represent a huge drop compared to sales figures for February 2001. Overall global semiconductor sales are down more than 35 percent compared to this time last year, and sales in the Americas are off by 47 percent compared to last February's total of USD4.75 billion in sales.
Scalise has continued to maintain that the semiconductor industry is a cyclical one, and said that semiconductor sales are projected to return to their historical growth rate this year. The association points to the growth path for the industry's technology, which is expected to lead to single chips which run at 10Ghz and contain more than 1 billion transistors within the next eight years.
Scalise said the speed of these next-generation chips will enable a catalogue of "breakthrough" applications, from effective telecommuting and distance learning to instantaneous translation which will let people speaking different languages communicate in real time.
The SIA is at http://www.sia-online.org.
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