IC Insights recently released a report showing that the global IC market growth forecast for the fourth quarter of this year has dropped from 23% in the first quarter to 6%.
IC Insights will conduct an in-depth analysis and detailed five-year forecast of the IC industry in the November update of the McClean report in 2018. It is expected that the IC industry will enter a cyclical “cooling down” period after a long period of strong growth.
The chart above shows global quarter-on-quarter IC market growth from the first quarter to the third quarter and IC Insights' forecast for the fourth quarter of this year. As shown in the figure, the IC market has experienced strong quarter-on-quarter growth since the first half of 2018. However, the IC market grew by 14% year-on-year in the third quarter. In addition, with the weakness of the memory market, IC Insights expects the IC market to grow only 6% year-on-year in the fourth quarter.
In 2017, the IC market grew by 11% in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. Growth in the third quarter of this year slowed to 6% relative to the second quarter. In summary, the weak memory market has begun to become the “backwind” of the entire IC market. Interestingly, the memory market growth rate in the third quarter of 2017 relative to the second quarter was very strong, reaching 18%. In contrast, the memory market grew by 8% in the same period in 2018, less than half of last year.
