Dusting The Pandemic Off

Adapting well and in time has been, and remains, the strongest hint of business survival. Is that what the semiconductor industry would be doing as it crawls out of the pandemic-hole?

- Pratima Harigunani

To lie low, to change the course, to shed dead skin, and to make new friends – Darwinian reflexes never go out of vogue. So, while we heard alarms about the future of the semiconductor industry, thanks to the direct blow to supply chains and fabrications, we might have missed the wind-chimes that were following close enough.

Yes, dents will happen given the force of this blow, but long-term species have a way of healing themselves and finding ways to go on. For this industry, this survival and adaptive dance would be two-pronged, as it appears now.

First, the demand would change tack. If electronics and upstream markets dry up, other pockets of growth would pop. Second, rock-stars in semiconductor materials might see new contenders emerging and gaining a good foothold. Wondering how? Let us break it down.

Same market, new appetite

Ok yes, the effect of the Corona outbreak is not something we can trivialize. If we look at Gartner’s recent reckoning, the worldwide semiconductor revenue was already going backward to USD 419.1 billion in 2019, down 12% from 2018. It noted how oversupply in the DRAM market nudged the overall memory market down 32.7% in 2019, making it the worst-performing device segment; especially the NAND flash that dived 26.4%.

So things can’t pick up immediately when weak demand from smartphone and hyper-scale cloud service providers affect fab plans and cut wafer starts to levels below 2018.