21% jump is largest increase in IC unit shipments since boom year 2010

The 2020-2025 IC unit volume CAGR is forecast to be 11%, five points more than the unit CAGR from 2015-2020, writes market researcher IC Insights. When ignoring the 5-year CAGR timeperiods with abnormally high or low endpoints, IC Insights believes that the long-term outlook for IC unit shipments is for a CAGR of 7%-8%, just below its 30-year rate of 9%. Illustrating how rare a drop in IC units shipments is, 2019 was only the fifth time in the history of the IC industry that IC unit volumes declined (the previous four years were 1985, 2001, 2009, and 2012) and there have never been two consecutive years of declining IC unit shipments. The CAGR trend line for IC unit volume from mid-2008 through 2015 was reduced to 6% from the historical CAGR of 9%. One of the primary reasons for this was that worldwide GDP increased at an average of only 2.1% over this eight-year period. Moreover, even with a 6% decline in IC unit shipments in 2019, the expected 2016-2021 quarterly IC unit volume shipment trend line is forecast to increase three percentage points to 9%, spurred by the expected huge 21% jump in IC unit shipments in 2021.