5. Global Semiconductors Back to Growing Status

Global semiconductor inventories tend to be healthy around Q4 2023, and semiconductors will return to growth in 2024. From the SEMI published equipment sales, 2023 global semiconductor equipment sales are expected to decline 6.1% year-on-year to 100.9 billion U.S. dollars, which will be the first time in four years into the contraction, but it is expected that the wafer equipment market will turn to a small amount of growth in 2024, sales are estimated to be 105.3 billion U.S. dollars, a year-on-year growth of 4%. 2025 is expected to be a significant growth of 18% to 124 billion U.S. dollars. Semiconductor growth in 2024 is expected to come from an increase in capacity utilization and prices. Firstly, the price of NAND, DRAM and other memories will stop falling and rebound, the demand for HBM will continue to climb; the demand for 5G communication; the demand for AI will boost the growth of HPC; and the penetration rate of electric vehicles will grow steadily, etc. It is expected that there will be a growth of 15~20% in 2024, mainly in the memory and design industries.