Changes on World Semiconductor Industry

As IT industry has been expanded to a mobile machine and digital electric home appliance from a personal computer (PC) and a demand on high value memory has sharply increased, there is a rapid change on a semiconductor industry.

According to the industry on September 17, DDR D-RAM product which has faster speed than the existing synchronized D-RAM (SD RAM), increased to 45.52%(on the basis of September 3) in all D-RAM market the year. 256 megabyte product has exceed the market of 128 megabyte product and its trend has rapidly been changed to a high speed & large capacity product.

▽ Changes on Industry 〓 There are changes on major products and industries. Invested in the high value products, Samsung Electronics is a powerful company in the field. Also, there is a severe competition between other companies.

Being the second place in the industry, Micron Technology hasn’t increased the weight of DDR owing to a problem of the technical process. Being the fourth place, Infineon introduced 300㎜ Wafer, but has struggled desperately against a low productivity and high cost. Elpida, NEC and Toshiba of Japan have a deficit in D-RAM field. On the other hand, Being behind the sixth place in the world at the end of last year, Nanya and Winbond of Taiwan suddenly leaped into prominence by increasing 80% of DDR weight through taking advantage of the market change. Hynix plans to increase the DDR production to 70% by the end of the year. Jeong Chang-Won, an analyst of Daewoo Securities expected “If the products are upgraded at DDR333, DDR2(400㎒) which is faster than the existing DDR 266㎒ next year, companies which makes profits the year will go ahead of, but other companies will accelerate the industry reorganization.”

▽ Changing Demanders 〓 There is a big change on the memory demander. Most of Samsung Electronics’ Memory Customer was computer companies such as Intel, IBM, Compaq Dell and HP in 1999. But, there are the mobile phone digital media software companies including Nokia, Sonny, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems as major customers. It is because the D-RAM DDR flash memory is essential for the game machine of Sony, Digital camera, Camcorder, Game X Box of Microsoft, and network equipment of Cisco.

According to Dataquest, there was 10% of consumer products such as 55% for PC, 8% for communication and electric home appliances for D-RAM Demand last year. But, PC will decrease to 27%, but communication and consumer will increase largely to 21% and 18% after 3 years. Samsung decreased to 36.5% for PC and increased to 19.5% for electric home appliance and 15.5% for mobile in terms of the memory sales weight the year.

As the mobile equipment has increased, the flash memory market which substitutes the small capacity hard disk drive, has rapidly changed by 50% each year.

Yeon-Su Shin ysshin@donga.com