European Chip distribution market shows solid growth in Q1/2018

Georg Steinberger, chairman of DMASS: “As we face peak demand in many industries and long lead-times for many semiconductor products, the growth is no surprise. It could have been even higher, considering channel shifts back to some manufacturers and the negative exchange rate effects from a weak US-Dollar. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, considering that customers have to push out production in many instances due to hard allocation in other component segments. Nevertheless, at the moment outlook is solid.” Regionally, the real surprise was the double-digit growth in smaller countries in Northern and Eastern Europe as well as in Austria and Iberia. Among the bigger regions, Italy grew fastest (9.7% to EUR 220 million), followed by Germany (6.4% to EUR 695 million) and the UK (6.3% to EUR 166 million). France reported below average growth of 3.4 percent to EUR 157 million. Eastern Europe in total grew 12 percent to EUR 366 million and Nordic by 5.4 percent to EUR 187 million. Georg Steinberger: “In a nutshell, the smaller countries grew faster than the big ones. The mix of fast-growing countries is surprising, however, reaching from smaller Nordic tech economies to increasingly critical production hubs in Eastern Europe. Italy’s high-tech industry continues to surprise positively as well.” A closer look at the products breakdown reveals strong and solid growth in Discretes (Small Signal, RF Discretes), Power Discretes (MOSFETs) and Sensors as well as in Programmable Logic – all double-digit – while Opto, Analog, Memories and Other Logic (ASSPs) came in short – between 1 and 2.5 percent. Analog, the biggest product group, grew by 2.4 percent to 672 EUR million, MOS Micro by 8 percent to 477 EUR million, Power by 16.9 percent to 241 EUR million, Opto (including LEDs) by 2.3 percent to EUR 217 million, Memories by 2.4 percent to EUR 184 million and Programmable Logic by 13.5 percent to EUR 153 million. Georg Steinberger: “Looking at the market by product, we cannot see a very consistent picture in Q1, some of the below-average increases in big product categories may be driven by allocation or channel shifts. However, one quarter does not really tell a story. After the dust of various market effects has settled, the situation may become clearer (and so far the weight of the big product groups has not really changed dramatically).”