Source: Cailian Press Author: Niu Zhanlin

    Although the shortage of chips caused by the epidemic turned into oversupply around the middle of last year, resulting in a sharp slowdown in sales, global chip sales continued to rise slightly throughout 2022, reaching a record high.

    According to the data released by the American Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) recently, the global chip sales in 2022 increased by 3.2% from US $555.9 billion in 2021 to a record US $573.5 billion.

    However, the chip industry encountered a clear headwind in the second half of the year. In the fourth quarter of 2022, chip sales fell 14.7% to $130.2 billion, 7.7% lower than the sales in the third quarter of 2022. The association also said that the sales volume in December 2022 was 4.4% lower than that in November to 43.4 billion US dollars.

    According to the analysis, there are three reasons for the industry‘s gloom: first, the uncertainty of the global economic outlook leads to a decline in demand; Second, chip overcapacity and excessive inventory need to be digested; Third, the lack of innovation in electronic products such as mobile phones has led to a longer interval between people changing devices.

    From a regional perspective, the sales growth in the American market was the largest in 2022, reaching 16.0%; However, China is still the largest chip market, with sales of 180.3 billion US dollars, but decreased by 6.3% compared with 2021. The annual sales of Europe and Japan also increased by 12.7% and 10.0% respectively.

    Compared with November 2022, sales in all regions decreased in December: Europe decreased by 0.7%, Japan decreased by 0.8%, China decreased by 5.7%, and the Americas decreased by 6.5%.

    In terms of chip types, the sales of analog chips (chips most commonly used in automobiles, consumer goods and computers) increased by 7.5% year-on-year to 89 billion US dollars; The sales of logic chips and memory chips accounted for the largest proportion, with global sales of 176 billion dollars and 130 billion dollars respectively.

    John Neuffer, CEO of SIA, said in a statement: "Although the market cyclical and macroeconomic conditions have led to short-term fluctuations in sales, the long-term prospects of the semiconductor market are still very strong because chips play an increasingly important role in making the world smarter, more efficient and more connected."

    In this US stock earnings season, many chip manufacturers mentioned that the increase of channel inventory level has become the biggest resistance. It can be seen from the financial reports of Intel, AMD and Qualcomm that in 2022, the two-year chip shortage caused by the COVID-19 has rapidly turned into chip surplus.

    Taking Qualcomm‘s financial report released this week as an example, the company‘s revenue in the first fiscal quarter was lower than analysts‘ expectations and issued weak quarterly guidance. Qualcomm said that the deterioration of the macroeconomic environment and the increase of channel inventory affected the company‘s performance. However, Qualcomm expects that China‘s recent optimization of COVID-19‘s epidemic prevention measures should boost consumer demand, and the situation may be better in the second half of the year.