Time: 2022.10.06
On Tuesday, SEMI released the latest quarter of the World Wafer Factory Forecast Report, which predicted that the equipment expenditure of global front-end wafer factories in this year would increase by about 9% year on year, reaching a historical high of 99 billion US dollars. In addition, Ajit Manocha, president and CEO of SEMI, said: "After reaching a record level in 2022, it is expected that the equipment market will maintain a healthy growth next year driven by new wafer factories and upgrading needs.".
SEMI estimates that Taiwan will lead the expenditure on wafer factory equipment this year, with a year-on-year growth of 47% to US $30 billion. At the same time, the mainland of China was only $22 billion, down 11.7% from the peak last year.
South Korea fell 5.5% to US $22.2 billion, but it is expected that the expenditure in Europe/Middle East will reach a record US $6.6 billion - although the absolute amount of expenditure is still lower than that in other regions, the year-on-year growth is as high as 141%.
SEMI expenditure, the strong demand for advanced technologies such as high-performance computing (HPC), is vigorously promoting the surge in expenditure in Europe/the Middle East. In addition, it is expected that the Americas and Southeast Asia will also obtain record high investment in 2023.
SEMI predicts that the capacity of 2023 wafers will continue to grow by 5.3% (from SEMI Fab Fort)
The SEMI World Wafer Factory Forecast Report shows that the global capacity growth in 2022 will strive to reach 8% (7.7%) after the growth of 7.4% in 2021.
The last time such a year-on-year growth rate occurred can be traced back to 2010, when the monthly production capacity of 200mm wafer equivalent exceeded 16 million pieces, about half of the estimated 29 million pieces in 2023.
By 2022, the capacity growth of 167 wafer plants and production lines will account for more than 84% of equipment expenditure. However, with the capacity increase of 129 known wafer factories and production lines, this figure is expected to fall back to 79% next year.
Not surprisingly, the OEM industry still accounts for the largest part of 2022/2023 equipment expenditure (53%), followed by storage (32% and 33% respectively in 2022/2023) - they are also the top two in the industry's capacity growth.
Finally, SEMI listed 1453 facilities/production lines in the updated global wafer fab forecast report in September, including 148 mass production facilities/production lines that will be put into production in 2022 or soon.
