SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A fourth-quarter slowdown took some of the steam out of an otherwise strong year for the worldwide semiconductor industry, according to a year-end report by the market research firm Dataquest Inc.
The world semiconductor market grew 32.9 percent in 1988, according to a preliminary survey of 112 leading chip manufacturers. The figure fell short of Dataquest's 35.8 percent forecast because of a fourth-quarter downturn caused by a shortage of memory chips, the company said.
Because of the shortage in memory chips, companies cut back on their orders for microprocessors and programmable logic devices, said Stan Bruederle, Dataquest vice president and director of research for the components division.
'We expect the fourth quarter will not grow and in fact will decline from the third quarter,' Bruederle said. 'I think roughly speaking it will be down 5 percent, but that's just a very rough idea.'
Japanese companies increased their share of the worldwide semiconductor market from 48 percent to 50 percent, while North American companies dropped from 39 percent to 37 percent.
But U.S. companies gained share in Japan, snaring more than 10 percent of the Japanese market for the first time since 1984. The Japanese dominance in Dynamic Random Access Memory chips helped Japanese companies control 20 percent of the North American market, an all-time high.
Companies that make memory chips, including DRAMs and Static Random Access Memory chips, led the pack in 1988, growing 91.1 percent. Companies that make microdevices were also strong, growing 42.8 percent. If memory and microdevice companies were removed from the survey, the semiconductor industry would have grown only 17.6 percent.
The top six semiconductor suppliers remained the same in 1988: NEC Corp., Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Motorola Corp., Texas Instruments Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd.
Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, ranked seventh, experienced the fastest growth, with sales jumping from $1.49 billion in 1987 to $2.43 billion in 1988, a 57.6 percent increase. The company's strength in microprocessors and the high demand for its 80386 chip spurred the growth, Dataquest said.
Dataquest continues to project 10 percent growth for the semiconductor industry in 1989, despite the downturn in the fourth quarter. Companies were adjusting their inventories to reflect the lack of memory chips, Bruederle said.
'This just appears to be a short-term trend,' he said.
