Electronics

In recent years, along with the volatility of stock markets such as the United States, the chip stock market has also experienced significant fluctuations and correction, and the downward trend is more than the overall trend of the market. The reason behind this is that the booming market environment that dominates the chip market in 2022 and 2021 is changing. Many chip companies have begun to significantly weaken their expectations of future demand, and there has been obvious differentiation in different application fields. Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation Report.

AMD, Micron, Intel, Samsung, NVIDIA and other chip giants have successively issued worse than expected performance forecasts or financial reports, which has significantly hit the market sentiment.

According to Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation, on October 28, Intel released its financial report for the third quarter of 2022, which 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 US $1019 million. The two core businesses of the company declined.

At the beginning of October, the fourth-quarter financial results of Meiguang, a storage chip giant, released in the 2022 fiscal year were also not satisfactory. The operating revenue of the fiscal quarter decreased by about 20% year on year; Net profit dropped by 45% year-on-year, as reported by Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation.

In fact, before that, chip giants such as AMD and NVIDIA all lowered their performance expectations. Although these giants focus on different businesses, they have expressed their concern about the large-scale cooling of the chip market on many occasions.

Market research institutions have also issued early warning. 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 tend to be soft. First, the global economic outlook is not optimistic. It is estimated that every 3 percentage point slowdown in global GDP growth will lead to 16 percentage points reduction in semiconductor market growth. Second, the personal computer (PC) market demand has been significantly weak, and Huacheng's import and export data observation report.

However, the cold wave of chips does not cover the whole industry, and the demand for chips used in automobiles has not weakened, which still forms a certain support for the prosperity of the industry. The chip shortage problem that began in 2020 has not subsided in the global auto industry, although it has improved. Recently, the latest data released by AutoForecast Solutions (AFS), an auto industry data forecasting company, on the global auto industry showed that as of September 25, due to the chip shortage, the global auto market has reduced production by about 3.3768 million vehicles this year.

Throughout the global market, the chip shortage continues and affects the global automobile production of some auto companies. The industry generally expects that the impact of "lack of core" on the auto industry will continue 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 the more advanced chip production field has not actually stopped.

On October 28, Japanese Prime Minister Mansuo Shoda said that he would invest 3 trillion yen in the semiconductor industry. According to the report of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 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 photolithography capacity. According to Reuters, Samsung Electronics said that despite the current global economic downturn, it plans to increase its advanced chip capacity by more than three times by 2027. All kinds of signs indicate that the chip industry will compete more fiercely in this field in the future. Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation reported.