World Chipmaking Equipment Sales Jump in May, Continuing Gains
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By Minoru Matsutani
Tokyo, July 25 (Bloomberg) -- Worldwide sales of equipment used to make microchips more than doubled in May, the 11th straight gain after 15 months of decline, further evidence of a recovery in the global chip market, an industry group said.
Chip equipment sales soared 126 percent in May from the same month a year earlier to $3.28 billion, the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan said.
Demand for equipment is rebounding as chipmakers such as Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest computer memory chipmaker, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and United Microelectronics Corp. -- the world's top makers of chips for other companies such as Motorola Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices - - expand production capacity.
The gain in May's sales also reflects increases in spending on equipment by Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, NEC Corp., Japan's largest maker of personal computers and microchips, Texas Instruments Inc., the No. 1 manufacturer of chips for cellular phones, and Motorola, the world's No. 2 maker of cellular phones.
Orders for chip equipment are getting a boost as companies retool factories to make chips with finer circuits. Smaller circuits allow more information to be packed onto chips, yielding faster and smaller chips and lower power consumption.
That's likely to boost the earnings of many of the world's biggest producers of microchip-making equipment, such as Applied Materials Inc. and Lam Research Corp. in the U.S., ASM Lithography Holding NV of the Netherlands and Tokyo Electron Ltd., Nikon Corp. and Advantest Corp. in Japan.
In addition, chipmakers and home video-game makers are teaming up to develop and make chips for future generations of video games and digital household electronics, creating new demand for equipment.
Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. in March last year agreed to spend 120 billion yen ($1.12 billion) to make chips for PlayStation 2, the successor to the best-selling video game player, while Nintendo Co. is joining with International Business Machines Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. to develop the successor to its Nintendo 64 game player.
Chipmaking-equipment sales figures tend to lag order numbers by up to half a year.
The following table breaks down world chipmaking-equipment sales by machinery category. Units are millions of dollars. |
