Electronics

Recently, with the shock of the stock market in the United States and other countries, the chip stock market has also seen significant fluctuations and corrections, and the downward trend is more than the overall trend of the market. The reason behind this is that the market environment that dominates the prosperity of the chip market in 2022 and 2021 is changing. Many chip enterprises' expectations of future demand have begun to weaken significantly, and there has been obvious differentiation in different application fields, Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation reported.

Chip giants such as AMD, Micron, Intel, Samsung, Nvidia, etc. have successively released worse than expected performance forecasts or financial statements, which has significantly hit market sentiment.

According to the observation report of Huacheng import and export data, on October 28, Intel's financial report for the third quarter of 2022 showed that the revenue in the third quarter fell by 20% year on year, and the net profit fell by 85% year on year, only $1019 million. The company's two core businesses declined.

At the beginning of October, Micron, a memory chip giant, also reported a disappointing fourth quarter financial report in fiscal year 2022. The operating income in the fiscal quarter decreased by about 20% year on year; Net profit dropped by 45% year on year, Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation reported.

In fact, previously, chip giants such as AMD and Nvidia lowered their performance expectations at the same time. Although these giants focus on different businesses, they have expressed their concern about a wide range of cooling in the chip market on many occasions.

Market research institutions have also issued warnings. Semiconductor Intelligence recently predicted that the global chip market will shrink by 6% in 2023; Malcolm Penn predicted that the chip market would decline by 22% in the coming year.

Market participants expect the industry to weaken. First, the global economic outlook is not very optimistic. It is estimated that every 3 percentage points deceleration of global GDP growth will lead to 16 percentage points reduction of semiconductor market growth. Second, the market demand for personal computers (PCs) has shown obvious weakness, as reported by Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation.

However, the cold wave of chips does not cover the whole industry, and the demand for chips for automobiles has not weakened, which still forms a certain support for the industry's prosperity. The problem of chip shortage starting from 2020 has improved in the global automotive industry, but it has not subsided. Recently, the latest data on the global auto industry released by the auto industry data forecasting company AutoForecast Solutions (AFS) showed that as of September 25, the global auto market had lost about 3.3768 million units in total this year due to the shortage of chips.

Looking at the global market, the shortage of chips continues and affects the production of some automobile enterprises worldwide. It is widely expected that the impact of the "core shortage" on the automotive industry will last at least until the middle or end of next year.

In addition, in contrast to the cautious expectation of the future and the reduction of investment, the investment in more advanced chip production has not actually stopped.

Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Kishida said on October 28 that he would invest 3 trillion yen in the semiconductor industry. According to the report of Japan Economic News, Canon will invest 50 billion yen to build a new semiconductor equipment factory in eastern Japan, which will start construction in 2023 and start operation in the spring of 2025, doubling its current lithography capacity. According to Reuters, Samsung Electronics said that despite the current global economic downturn, it plans to more than triple the capacity of its advanced chips by 2027. All kinds of signs indicate that the chip industry will be more competitive in this field in the future, Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation reported.