Gartner heralds rebounding semiconductor sales

Gartner has revised its predictions for global semiconductor sales

Sales of semiconductors are increasing faster than expected and will be back at 2008 levels next year, according to data from Gartner.

The analyst house revised its forecast for global semiconductor sales upwards for 2009, and predicts that the market will fall 11.4 per cent, compared to the 17 per cent it had predicted earlier in the year.

Gartner said that the market would be back up to 2008 sales levels by 2010, showing a 13 per cent increase on 2009.

"The revenue forecast for the commodity memory market – DRAM and Nand Flash – has improved because of the stronger demand outlook, which means that pricing has strengthened more than previously forecast," said Bryan Lewis, a research vice president at Gartner.

Better than expected sales in the PC and mobile phone industry were behind the prediction, said Lewis.

"Both device types experienced lower revenue declines than the industry average, and DRAM began to be profitable for some vendors in the third quarter of 2009 after almost three years of losses," he said.

"While most of the news has been positive to date, recent channel checks in Taiwan indicate concerns that PC orders are slowing earlier than the seasonal norm and that 2010 may get off to a slow start."

Lewis added that application-specific standard products, memory and compute microprocessors are all showing strong growth.