The worldwide capital equipment market fell 15% last year to $36.9bn from $43.5 billion in 2011, says SEMI.
SEMI expects a flat to single-digit decline trend this year and a strong recovery in 2014.
For the Southeast Asia region, SEMI expects to see capital equipment investment to bottom out in the first half of 2013 and a mild pickup in the second half followed by a strong recovery in 2014.
Foundry and memory are the two major sectors that invest most in the region.
For foundries, Globalfoundries’ expansion plan at Fab 7 will be completed by mid-2014 while UMC continues to upgrade their Fab 12i capacity to a 40nm process.
Memory is the only sector in the SE Asia region to see investment growth this year.
Power semiconductors and MEMS are expected to see meaningful recovery in 2014.
Front-end capacity will grow 1.7% this year and 8.2% in 2014, exceeding overall global capacity growth of 5.2%.
The growth will mainly be driven by the memory sector, specifically from NAND flash capacity as Micron gears up for further expansion at its Singapore NAND flash facility next year plus ongoing capacity conversion from DRAM to NAND flash at Fab 7 (Tech).
Singapore is emerging to become the third-largest NAND flash manufacturing country in the world, following South Korea and Japan, by the end of 2014. The conversion and the expansion projects will drive related semiconductor investment in the region in 2013 and 2014.
Southeast Asia continues to be the largest packaging materials consumption market in the world, representing a market size of $6.6 billion in 2013 and $6.8 billion in 2014.
The region’s back-end equipment investment remains significant with over $1 billion spending each year throughout 2012 to 2014, accounting for about 17% of worldwide share, says SEMI.
