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As the global vaccination rate rose, and border restrictions in Europe and North America eased, social activities also began to enter a period of recovery, with the consumer electronics market seemingly ready for the arrival of the traditional peak season in 2H21, according to TrendForce’s latest investigations. At the same time, however, the global supply chain was affected by delays in maritime transport, skyrocketing shipping costs, and component shortages, in addition to already-prohibitive price hikes for certain components in 1H21. Given the parallel rise in both material and manufacturing costs, the market for end products has not undergone the expected cyclical upturn in 2H21. Even so, the overall demand for and shipment of smartphones, notebook computers, and monitors experienced QoQ increases in 3Q21, thereby driving up businesses for major OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) companies. For 3Q21, the revenues of the top 10 OSAT companies reached US$8.89 billion, a 31.6% YoY increase.
By leveraging advantages such as lifelike interaction and virtual simulation, the metaverse will enable the growth of various applications ranging from virtual meetings, digital modeling and analysis, to virtual communities, gaming, and content creation, in the infancy of its development. According to TrendForce’s latest investigations, constructing the metaverse, which is more complex than the existing internet world, requires more powerful data processing cores, networking environments capable of transferring enormous data, and user-side AR/VR devices with improved display performances. These requirements will further drive forward the development of memory products, advanced process technologies, 5G telecommunications, and display technologies.
DRAM buyers were aggressively stocking up during 1H21 because quotes began to rise at the start of the year, and there were concerns about shortages in the supply chain, according to TrendForce’s latest investigations. To avoid the risk of a supply crunch, most DRAM buyers kept raising their demand until the middle of the year. Moving into this second half of the year, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated component gaps, the adverse effect of which on OEMs’ ability to assemble their end products has widened as well. Due to having a glut of memory and a shortage of other key components, some OEMs have opted to scale back DRAM procurement. PC OEMs have especially become noticeably restrained in this regard. Fortunately, the server-related segment of the market has been propping up the overall demand; and because of this, most DRAM suppliers were able to post a marginal growth in shipments for 3Q21. Additionally, quotes for DRAM product also kept rising in 3Q21. On account of these factors, the quarterly total DRAM revenue rose again by 10.2% QoQ to US$26.6 billion for 3Q21.
According to TrendForce’s latest report on the server industry, not only have emerging applications in recent years accelerated the pace of AI and HPC development, but the complexity of models built from machine learning applications and inferences that involve increasingly sophisticated calculations has also undergone a corresponding growth as well, resulting in more data to be processed. While users are confronted with an ever-growing volume of data along with constraints placed by existing hardware, they must make tradeoffs among performance, memory capacity, latency, and cost. HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and CXL (Compute Express Link) have thus emerged in response to the aforementioned conundrum. In terms of functionality, HBM is a new type of DRAM that addresses more diverse and complex computational needs via its high I/O speeds, whereas CXL is an interconnect standard that allows different processors, or xPUs, to more easily share the same memory resources.
Various MLCC suppliers’ book-to-bill ratios as well as quarterly shipments for 4Q21 now show signs of decline, according to TrendForce’s latest investigations. Not only has the demand for consumer electronics slowed, but ODMs’ clients have also eased their procurement activities due to issues including the global chip shortage, mismatched component availabilities, and China’s power rationing. Demand in the automotive market, on the other hand, has remained strong since 3Q21. Automotive applications have therefore become an important point of focus in MLCC suppliers’ latest product planning and capacity expansion efforts. Thanks to these in-demand applications, annual MLCC demand from the automotive market for 2021 is expected to reach 449 billion pcs, a 20% YoY increase.