How New Technologies Changed the Semiconductor Cycle
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This brief introduction on the latest performance of Semiconductor-makers made me think about the overall sector.
In August, the world’s semiconductor-makers shipped chips worth a record US$35bn, up by more than 20% over a year earlier. That growth has been reflected in stock prices. The semiconductor index has risen 43% over the last 12 months, and at yesterday’s close was just 11% below its all-time high, set in March 2000.
Considering the semiconductor industry’s history of vicious boom and bust cyclicality, it is no surprise that investors question whether the latest growth phase has now run its course.
Semiconductor demand is more balanced and driven by mobile phones rather than PCs
However, the biggest changes have occurred on the demand side. Between 2000 and 2016, demand soared, with semiconductor revenues increasing 70% from US$200bn to US$340bn. At the same time, the make-up of that demand changed.
Emerging Markets bypassed PC-ownership
At the same time, improved mobile phone functionality and reduced costs have meant that many people in the developing world have bypassed PC-ownership entirely and bought smartphones as their first computing devices.
This change in the composition of demand has also reduced the severity of semiconductor cycles.
Diversification is key to sustain the Semiconductor cycle
New applications seeing high growth include:
- Machine learning
- Automotive.
- The internet of things.
The industry no longer lives and dies by the PC cycle.
- So far the current boom has largely benefited the makers of less technologically advanced chips.
- In the past, the inventory cycle was the principal leading indicator of the health of the semiconductor industry. In the future it will be necessary to follow a greater variety of signals.
Thank you for posting @vlemon.
Well written and excellent images....it seems that no matter how technology literate one may be.....it is a steep learning curve...every day. ^_^
Cheers.
Indeed, it is almost frightening !
Thank you for the upvote and comment @bleujay.
Are you French ?
Appreciate your kind reply @vlemon.
Thank you for inquiring. No....just well-travelled.... ^_^
Good catch. It is a subtle way to get the grey cells active when one visits bleujay's site.
All the best. Cheers.
It's amazing what phones can do nowdays. With the incredible pictures they can take, and the speed at which they can perform not only single tasks, but multi-tasks that's one of the experiments I'd like to do next year and see how much money I can make only using my phone.
Can't wait to see the next step in evolution with the development of self driving cars.
Iphone destroyed so many industries. Photo & PC to start with ^^
This post is upvoted by Polsza for 87 %.
If you want help us growing upvote this comment.
Thanks !
Catching-up, leapfrogging and falling behind in terms of output and productivity in high-tech industries crucially depends on firms ability to keep pace with technological change. In fast changing industries todays specialization does not guarantee tomorrows success as changes in the technological trajectories reward and punish firms specialization patterns. This highlights the importance of studying the relationship between technology life cycle and specialization patterns of new and incumbent innovators. From an empirical point of view life cycles have been extensively analysed at the industry and product level but not so deeply at the technology one even though plenty of theoretical contributions exist. We define a methodology to describe the life cycle stages of the main technological paradigm within an industry and of the technological areas it is composed of. The methodology is based on the analysis of the age composition of the different areas and of the characteristics of their technological trajectories. We use the classification of the life cycle stages of the single areas to investigate specialization patterns of new and incumbent innovators. Our results show that up to the end of the 1990s firms from Taiwan, Korea and Singapore specialized mainly in areas at the later stages of their life cycles, whereas US and Japanese firms were comparatively better in younger areas. Specialization patterns changed in the beginning of the 2000s, when the Asian Tigers started to become comparatively stronger in emerging areas. Keywords Technology Life Cycle, Industry Life Cycle, Product Life Cycle, Specialization Patterns, Technological Paradigms, Technological Trajectories, Main Path Analysis, Catching-up, Semiconductors, Citation networks, Community Detection
Copy-paste is apparently your best friend. Writing this in 30sec who would believe you? :D
Have a good day.
lolz
if you can't write then don't blme anyone
it took 4 minutes to write
Busted!
It appears that it took her 4 minutes to write that as you posted 29 minutes ago and she posted the comment 25 minutes ago (not saying she didn't copy pasta though)
Yup but I checked before saying it. Maybe it took her 4min to write this book too ^^.
It is just obivous with the formating and the structure.
Sorry for being "mean" ^^
The advances in technology is just astounding, imagine that the average smart phone a few years back had more computing power than all of NASA when they did the Moon landing and now they are even more powerful