LONDON — Surprising weakness in the memory market in Q4 2007 has caused iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) to derate its estimate of the global semiconductor market in 2007. In a preliminary estimate given in November 2007 iSuppli predicted the global chip market would grow by 4.1 percent in 2007. It has now said that prediction was wrong and that the market grew only 3.3 percent in 2007 to $268.9 billion.
Worldwide DRAM revenue fell by 19.1 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the third. Previoysly iSuppli had forecast a 4.7 percent decline. Meanwhile, NAND flash revenue declined by 3.9 percent in the same quarter, well below iSuppli's previous forecast of 3 percent growth. This caused memory chip revenue in the fourth quarter to decline by 11 percent sequentially, down from iSuppli's prediction of 1.2 percent growth in overall memory chip revenue.
"During the second half of 2006, memory IC revenues helped to prop up the growth of the overall semiconductor industry. In 2007, the poor results for memory chips restrained overall market growth. If memory were excluded from the revenue total, the semiconductor market would have grown by 2.4 percent in the fourth quarter. However, due to the influence of the weak memory market, total semiconductor market revenues fell by 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter," said Dale Ford, senior vice president, market intelligence, for iSuppli, in a statement.
Weak market conditions had a major impact on most memory suppliers in 2007, including Nanya Technology and Qimonda, which saw their memory IC revenues fall by 32.4 percent and 26 percent respectively for the year.
The world's leading supplier of memory chips, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. of South Korea, experienced a decline of 3.3 percent in its memory semiconductor revenue in 2007—contributing to a 0.8 percent decline in total chip revenue for the year.
