16 Insights on ICs

Industry ekes out just 2% growth in 2015
Rick Merritt
9/22/2015 06:20 PM EDT

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – The semiconductor industry is poised for slow steady growth that will drive more consolidation, but big technology transitions are just two to three years away. That was the conclusion of the annual fall forecast that Bill McClean, president of IC Insights, delivered here.

The semiconductor market is expected to be nearly flat this year up two percent to $362 billion, rising just 4.9% on a compound basis through 2019 to $450 billion. A world economy chugging along at a sluggish 2-3% GDP growth for the past several years is mainly to blame.

“This is very unusual, in 35 years I’ve been doing this, we have not seen a fairly flat five-year period of 2-3% GDP growth like this,” said McClean. “We won’t have a big cycle in semiconductors until there’s a big cycle in GDP growth, and it doesn’t seem like its coming,” he said in his annual talk here.

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