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Alliance is the way to servive in IC Industry
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Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Experts at the ISS Europe conference here this week (Feb. 10) remain divided on whether the slumping global semiconductor industry has at last bottomed out. But they were united in calling for alliances among producers and that China is the chip market of the future.
"There are Cassandras who say that the market is saturated. This is not the case," said Peter Bauer, chief marketing officer for Munich-based Infineon Technologies AG. Memory producers remain dominant, since few other market segments have seen constant growth recently. One reason is the appetite for new memory applications. "The only field of semiconductor technology that is growing constantly, measured by the [chips] demanded, is the memory sector," said Bauer, who did not exclude further IC industry consolidation.
The opposite view was represented by Doug Dunn, president and chief executive of the Dutch equipment producer ASML (Veldhoven, The Netherlands). "Compared to the year 2000, the demand for lithography machines fell by 60 percent, and the end is not in sight," Dunn said. Dunn added that he saw no new application that could increase chip demand any time soon. Instead, the global economic uncertainty will have a braking effect on the semiconductor industry, he said.
Given the uncertain outlook, alliances were on the minds of many here. David Wang, executive vice president of the equipment supplier Applied Materials (Santa Clara, Calif.), said companies striving for technical leadership must invest heavily in research. Hence, Wang said, technology partnerships are an appropriate means of strengthening competitiveness.
European companies such as Infineon, STMicroelectronics and Philips, "are involved in taking over market leadership, not only in research and development, but also in production," said Wang.
Added Dunn, "Increasing production costs will lead to the formation of alliances, takeovers and outsourcing. The big ones will get even bigger."
Infineon's Bauer also endorsed alliances, forecasting growth in the number of industry associations in fields like chip manufacturing. Some cooperation with foundries and subsidiaries could also occur, according to Bauer.
By: DocMemory
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