On December 15th, SEMI released its year-end semiconductor equipment forecast on SEMICON Japan.

SEMI predicts that global OEM sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment will increase by 16% from 2019's 59.6 billion US dollars, reaching 68.9 billion US dollars, setting a new industry record. The global semiconductor manufacturing equipment market will continue to grow and is expected to reach 71.9 billion US dollars in 2021 and 76.1 billion US dollars in 2022.

SEMI said the demand for semiconductor front-end and back-end equipment will provide growth momentum. Front-end fab equipment, including wafer processing, fab equipment and photomask equipment, will increase by 15% this year to $59.4 billion, and will increase by 4% and 6% in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

Foundry and logic businesses account for about half of the total sales of fab equipment. Driven by investment in cutting-edge technology, spending this year will increase by 15% to $30 billion. Spending on NAND manufacturing equipment will soar 30% this year to more than $14 billion, and DRAM is expected to lead this growth trend in 2021 and 2022.

SEMI predicts that the assembly and packaging equipment market will grow by 20% in 2020, reaching 3.5 billion U.S. dollars. Driven by advanced packaging devices, it will grow by 8% and 5% in 2021 and 2022, respectively. The semiconductor test equipment market is expected to grow by 20% in 2020 to reach US$6 billion and will continue to expand in 2021 and 2022 to meet the needs of 5G and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.