Georg Steinberger, DMASS’ chairman, said: “A combination of several factors led to this all-time-record year for DMASS members – high demand in all industries, long lead-times and price increases, new and exciting technologies, deeper penetration of existing applications with more semi technology. We see, however, a slight slowdown in the growth rate and a high order backlog, which in combination could mean a certain risk for 2018. The first quarter 2018 will show in which direction the year will go.”
In terms of regional demand, the German market grew by 11.7% to €597million, sales in Italy rose by 13.8% to €170m, while those in the UK were said to be 5.3% higher at €142m.
The quarter saw strong demand for discretes, power, sensors, opto and memory, while analogue, MOS micro and logic in general were seen to struggle.
Demand for analogue components was 8.5% higher at €571m, while demand for high end MCUs saw the MOS micro category grow by 9.9% to €424m. One of the strongest performances came from the power sector, where demand rose by 23.9% to €209m. Demand for programmable logic remained almost flat on a quarter to quarter basis.
Steinberger commented: “The strongest product groups in the DTAM historically were also the ones that performed below-average in Q4 and the entire year – analogue, MOS micro and logic. Of the biggest single product categories, the stars in 2017 were FETs and high end MCUs.”
