Americas region keeps growing chip sales as China slips

Europe’s chip market was down 5.7 percent in November compared with a year before in a global chip market that achieved 20.7 percent annual growth, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

The global growth is being driven by Americas region – with a 54.9 percent annual jump to US$19.5 billion in a global chip market worth US$57.82 billion in the three-month average of September, October and November.

The Americas region is responsible for a third of global chip sales (33.7 percent) while China has slipped back to be responsible for about 28 percent. China’s market contracted on a month-to-month basis joining Europe and Japan.

The numbers while showing growth overall, appear to express a tension between strong sales into data centers and related AI markets but a weakness in automotive, industrial and communications markets that has spread to consumer electronics.

“The global semiconductor market continued to grow substantially in November, hitting its highest-ever monthly sales total as month-to-month sales increased for the eighth consecutive month,” said John Neuffer, CEO of SIA, in a statement.

Monthly data is given by the SIA as a three-month average although the source of the data, WSTS, tracks sales monthly basis. The SIA and other regional semiconductor industry bodies opt to use averaged data because it evens out the actual data that typically shows troughs at the beginnings of quarters and peaks at the ends of quarters.