While Q1 was still negative, Q2 reported growth of over 25 per cent valuing the market at over €2.3bn.
Component shortages are still a serious issue and predictions as to how long these shortages will last remain unclear.
According to Georg Steinberger, chairman of DMASS: “The unknown is not production, as new capacities will not come online any time soon, but the more than fuzzy demand from the customer side. 2021 is probably safe from a sales perspective, but beyond that…”
At a country or region level, the overall situation is extremely positive, with double-digit growth almost across the board, although variations are significant. Northern and Eastern Europe, the UK, Iberia, Benelux, Italy, Turkey and some smaller countries grew between 28% and 77%, while Germany saw 15.1% growth and France 19.8%.
“What is interesting to note is that major EU countries have difficulties in keeping up with the average growth rate. What is also quite amazing is the fact that the UK does not seem to struggle at all with any Brexit ramifications, at least not in the components business.”
Among products discretes grew by 58%, followed by memories, power, sensors and opto, while programmable logic declined by 11.8% and other logic by 4%. It appears that the component shortage is impacting major product groups such as analogue and MOS micro most.
DMASS said that 2021 is shaping up well, but that the jury is ‘still out’ on how long shortages may last. It also warned that how governments react to these shortages could have a major impact on the supply chain and pricing going forward.
