The 8-inch wafer foundry capacity is tight, and foundries have increased their foundry prices, and later packaging and testing plants have also followed up the price increase, which has led to the continuous expansion of the price increase effect of semiconductor products, including panel driver ICs, microcontrollers and memory. News of price increases came out.
With the rapid rise of the housing economy, market demand for notebook computers, tablet computers, TVs, monitors, and Netcom is stronger than expected. Coupled with the multiple growth of power management chips for 5G smartphones, the demand for 8-inch foundry production capacity is driven Surge.
In addition, due to trade tensions between the United States and China, the foundry SMIC in mainland China was included in the list of Chinese companies owned or controlled by the Chinese military by the United States, prompting SMIC’s US customers to switch orders to respond. And the world’s advanced production capacity is fully loaded, especially the 8-inch foundry production capacity is seriously in short supply.
In response to production expansion and higher costs, World Advanced has taken the lead in raising the price of 8-inch wafer foundry in the fourth quarter. UMC believes that the supply and demand situation of the 8-inch foundry market has undergone structural changes, and will follow up with the increase in foundry prices next year. SMIC also negotiates prices with customers for new customers and new projects.
As wafer foundries gradually increase foundry prices, later packaging and testing plants have followed up with price increases. Panel driver IC packaging and testing company Chi Bang began to increase the test prices of some high-end driver ICs in October, considering the strong appreciation of the Taiwan dollar against the US dollar, and is observing whether it will increase prices in the first half of next year.
Lingsheng also plans to moderately increase prices for customers quoting U.S. dollars in the first quarter of next year in response to the gap in gold prices and exchange rates. The market has reported that China’s semiconductor packaging production capacity is tight, and some packaging prices will increase by 5% to 10% in the first quarter of next year.
In response to the increase in foundry and packaging and testing prices and cost increases, panel driver IC manufacturers Novatek and Duntai will increase product prices, and microcontroller (MCU) manufacturers Lingtong and Songhan will also increase sales of some products. ELAN decided to increase the price of microcontrollers from January next year.
Niche-type memory has been tight due to increased demand and production capacity. Winbond, Etron and Jinghao Branch have all reported that they have notified customers of price increases, which have increased by more than 10%.
Foreign investment expects that with the increase in niche memory quotations, Winbond and Power Semiconductor, whose product lines cover niche memory and coded flash memory (NOR Flash), will have limited NOR Flash capacity increase. Helps NOR Flash’s quotations increase quarter by quarter in the first half of next year.
The effect of semiconductor price increases continues to expand. Analyst Wang Zhaoli said that it is expected to stimulate demand to heat up further. Customers are rushing to reserve inventory before product prices increase. This will help semiconductor factories to perform in the off-season in the fourth quarter, but this may cause repetition. In a single situation, whether the industry will face inventory adjustment pressure in the future is worth tracking.
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