The equipment industry is optimistic in 2020

Recently, the Ministry of Finance of Japan announced the import and export figures for December 2019, among which the export value of semiconductor equipment surged by 26%. As one of the major suppliers of semiconductor equipment in the world, the import and export situation of the Japanese semiconductor equipment industry is quite representative. Its apparent turnaround has added new signs to the recent improvement in global semiconductor demand. The industry generally expects that after the entire semiconductor market is cold in 2019 and the semiconductor manufacturing equipment market is down, it will obviously recover in 2020, and it is expected that the market size will reach a new high in the next few years.
 
The equipment industry is optimistic in 2020
 
2019 is a bleak year for the semiconductor equipment industry. Affected by the coldness of the entire semiconductor market, the global semiconductor equipment market will decline in 2019. Data show that global semiconductor equipment sales in 2019 will decrease by 10.5% compared to the previous year to US $ 57.6 billion. However, several global semiconductor giants Samsung Electronics, TSMC and Intel have unanimously increased their capital expenditure in 2020, and the industry is optimistic about the trend of the semiconductor equipment industry in 2020.
 
TSMC said at a conference held in January this year that it would increase capital expenditures in 2020 from the original 11 billion US dollars to 14 billion to 15 billion US dollars, a record high. Samsung Electronics announced in 2019 that it will invest $ 116 billion in the next ten years to promote its expansion in the field of logic chip manufacturing, focusing on upgrading the development of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process technology. Intel recently stated in its 2019 financial report that the planned capital expenditure for 2020 is about $ 17 billion. At present, there is news in the industry that "Intel will invest in 7nm ahead of time." Intel's equipment investment plan for 2020 will not only increase the capacity of the existing 14 / 10nm process, but also invest in the 7 / 5nm process.
 
These news have formed a bullish effect on the semiconductor equipment market. Under this influence, the industry began to be optimistic about the trend of the semiconductor equipment industry in 2020. Research institutions predict that in 2020, semiconductor equipment will grow 5.5% from 2019 and return to the scale of US $ 60.8 billion. Global sales of semiconductor equipment in 2021 will increase by 9.8% compared to 2020, reaching a historical high of US $ 66.8 billion.
 
Analyzing the recovery of the semiconductor equipment industry in this round, it can be found that the increase in capital expenditure by the three major semiconductor giants is of course a direct factor driving the growth of the semiconductor equipment industry. The further reason is that it has been affected by the development of new-generation information technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence The impact has stimulated the demand for semiconductor products. 5G and artificial intelligence technologies are the main application areas of advanced processes.
 
For example, in 2019, many mobile phone manufacturers will launch 5G models. Most of these models use 12nm ~ 7nm advanced technology baseband chips, such as Qualcomm Snapdragon X50, MediaTek Helio M70, Intel XMM 8000 series, Samsung Exynos 5000 series, Hisilicon Balong 5000 series Wait. This creates a potential demand for semiconductor equipment.