New Gartner research found that continued memory investment expansion again dominated the global spending picture.
Partially fuelled by the need for new capacity, and partially fuelled by competitive positioning, memory spending rose 36 per cent, Gartner said, significantly outpacing the overall semiconductor market.
“The 2006 market was marked by a reacceleration of capacity buys and strong memory spending, combined with new equipment for the ramp up of 65-nanometer (nm) processing and first 45 nm purchases,” said Gartner semiconductor manufacturing research group managing vice-president Klaus Rinnen.
“The wafer fab equipment (WFE) segment grew 25.7 per cent in 2006, while back-end equipment (BEE) showed a 14.1 per cent increase, having entered into a slowing trend during the year,” the report said.
“As fab utilisation rates rose, new fab activity increased and so did the capacity buying component. Memory-capacity-related equipment sales continued to dominate the mix. The packaging and assembly equipment (PAE) segment grew 18.2 percent, and the automated test equipment (ATE) segment expanded 9.3 percent.”
Meanwhile, in a separate report Gartner said Intel remained at the top of the rankings for largest semiconductor company in the world despite a difficult year in which its revenues slipped 12 per cent.
Gartner found global semiconductor revenues grew US$262.7 billion in 2006, a healthy 10.2 per cent increase over 2005.
The report found that until the fourth quarter of 2006, Intel lost share with its processors (CPUs) in the server and consumer segments to arch-rivals AMD.
AMD executed with impressive gains in market share, including the mobile, desktop, and server product families in Dell. Revenues were further eroded by an across-the-board price war which impacted Intel the most.
However, late 2006 marked a turnaround for Intel, with the release of its Core 2 Duo and Xeon 5100 series products. Gartner analysts expect Intel to re-capture losses in market share in 2007 with their new product offerings.
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