Americas’ boom continues as China falters in global chip market
December global chip sales completed a year of strong market expansion but showed declining growth in China and other geographic regions and increased European chip market contraction.
In the Americas region a phenomenal boom continued to accelerate, according to numbers from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).
Global semiconductor sales were US$627.6 billion in 2024, an increase of 19.1 percent compared to the 2023 total of US$526.8 billion. The publishing of three-month-moving average sales for December, a proxy for the 4Q24, revealed that fourth quarter sales were US$170.9 billion were 3.0 percent higher than the 3Q24 and 17.1 percent higher than 4Q23.
It is the Americas region that has been carrying this growth. The SIA reported a three-month average figure of US$20.05 billion in December, which can also be read as US$60.15 billion in 4Q24, up 56.3 percent on the same 3MMA in December and 4Q23.
The Americas was the only region to show quarter-to-quarter growth – up 16.3 percent – while all the other regions contracted on the same basis.
The collapse of China’s growth has been rapid. The annual growth of China’s chip market fell from 22.9 percent in September, a proxy for the 3Q24, to just 2.6 percent in December and the 4Q24. This rapid loss of growth will likely tip the Chinese chip market into contraction in at least the first part of 2025. China’s growth has dipped below that of Japan and Asia-Pacific/RoW.
Europe’s chip market is already contracting and this increased in December/4Q24 to 8.6 percent on an annual basis. This was a reversal of some better indicators that appeared in October.
The pattern remains consistent with a semiconductor market driven by an AI boom and the extreme success of Nvidia counterbalanced by sluggishness in the automotive, industrial and infrastructure markets.
Three-month average of chip sales by geographic region for November, December 2024. Source: SIA/WSTS.
“The global semiconductor market experienced its highest-ever sales year in 2024, topping $600 billion in annual sales for the first time, and double-digit market growth is projected for 2025,” said John Neuffer, CEO of the SIA, in a statement. A growth forecast of 11.2 percent was recently made by World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS), the organization that tracks chip sales on behalf of the industry.
Europe’s chip market shrinks as WSTS trims forecasts for 2025
The AI boom helped drive both logic and memory product sales in 2024. Memory component sales increased by 78.9 percent in 2024 to a total of $165.1 billion, driven partly by increased average selling prices. DRAM sales increased by 82.6 percent partly because it includes the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) format of memory used within Nvidia AI processors.
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.
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