The European semiconductor distribution industry continues to deliver good news. According to DMASS (Distributors’ and Manufacturers’ Association of Semiconductor Specialists) semiconductor distribution sales in Q2/CY14 grew by 5.3% to 1.6 Billion Euro. Almost all the major regions contributed. Only France, Benelux, Nordic and Switzerland are on the naughty step.
Georg Steinberger, chairman of DMASS, commented: “Our market seems to have reached a solid growth level in the 5+% range. Particularly encouraging was the fact that Germany, after a few weak quarters, is back on track and brought in a very healthy 11% increase over CY13. For DMASS in total, the first half of CY14 ended at 6.6% growth, to 3.2 Billion Euro. We are pretty certain that the full year will end positive.”
Regionally, Germany and Eastern Europe led the growth with 11% and 10.2% respectively. German sales climbed to 514 Million Euro, Eastern Europe (excluding Russia) to 183m Euro. The UK continued its recovery by adding a solid 7.3% to 131m Euro, and Italy grew by 3.7% to 161m. The French market lost ground, declining 2.6% to 122m Euro, while Nordic region sales fell 8.7% to 141m Euro compared to Q2/CY13.
Steinberger added: “Nordic and Benelux were certainly the weak spots last quarter while Germany regained some of its old strength. Over the course of 6 months, the picture has stabilised somewhat, but some risks remain: France develops below average, Benelux, too, and we do not know yet the impact of the sanctions against Russia in our market, although Russia only contributes 4% to the DMASS total.”
Optoelectronics led the chargeThe amount of electricity present upon the capacitor's plates. Also, the act of forcing of electrons onto the capacitor's plates. See CoulombA coulomb is the unit of electric charge. It is named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.1 coulomb is the amount of electric charge transported by a current of 1 ampere in 1 second. It can also be defined in terms of capacitance and voltage, where one coulomb is defined as one farad of capacitance times one volt of electric potential difference.. in the product sectors with a 13.5% to 164m Euro, driven by LEDs. Discrete components sales rose 13.6% to 89m Euro. Power was up 8.2% to 162m Euro. Analogue components contributed a healthy by 9.5% increase to 472m Euro and MOS Micro sales advanced 6.4% to 336m Euro. Off the pace were Memories which declined 1.8% to 122m Euro and Programmable Logic down 6.9% to 118m Euro.
"We observe for some time now clear growth spots like High-end-MCUs, High-end Analog and LEDs, while other mainstream technologies – former shooting stars like Programmable Logic, Other Logic, DSPs or Memories seem to go through a weak period; arguably, an interesting development that has to be watched more closely,” Gerog Steinberger concluded.