Due to the slowing growth of the mobile communication industry, global market research firm TrendForce projects that the total revenue from sales of semiconductors worldwide will grow by a mere 0.9% year on year in 2015, a sharp plunge from the 10.5% year-on-year growth in 2014. Looking forward to 2016, the decline in the sales of memory products will become steeper and drag down the total semiconductor sales revenue. As a result, semiconductor revenue growth is projected to become negative and slide slightly by 0.6% year on year, amounting to around US$329 billion.
Global demand of servers has been weaker than expected since the middle of the second quarter. Sales of PCs were also sluggish during the traditional peak season of the third quarter. Consequently, the server DRAM market saw a noticeable price decline in the third quarter. Server DRAM prices, however, have started to stabilize going into the final quarter of this year because of the growing demand from large-sized data centers.
Set against the previous quarter, the average contract price of mainstream PC-Client OEM SSDs has fallen by 10~11% in the fourth quarter, according to DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. This marks the fourth straight time that the SSD price decline has exceed 10%.
The latest report from DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, finds that NAND flash prices fell rapidly in the third quarter, resulting in a mere 2.4% quarterly increase in the global NAND Flash revenue. Sean Yang, assistant vice president of DRAMeXchange, said demand was uncharacteristically weak in the third quarter and did not adhere to the seasonal pattern.
Though DRAM prices continue to fall, mobile DRAM has been more resistant to price decline than other memory products. With the bit supply increasing, mobile memory accounted for 40% of the total DRAM revenue in the third quarter, and its share of the revenue is expected to keep expanding. According to DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, mobile DRAM revenue increased by 18% in the third quarter compared with the second quarter.
