Weekly Industry Highlights (Weekly 3 for 2025)

Market: Semiconductor sales, SSDs, AI chips

01. Global semiconductor sales up 20.7 per cent year-on-year in November

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that global semiconductor sales reached $57.8 billion in November 2024, up 20.7% year-over-year and 1.6% sequentially. The data, compiled by World Semiconductor Trade Statistics, is a three-month moving average.The SIA accounts for 99 per cent of US semiconductor industry revenues and nearly two-thirds of non-US chip companies. Its president and chief executive officer, John Neuffer, said the global semiconductor market continued to grow sharply in November, with monthly sales rising for the eighth month in a row to a record high. Sales in the Americas increased 54.9 per cent year-on-year, driving sales up more than 20 per cent year-on-year for the fourth consecutive month.

02. Marvell Releases AI Acceleration Chip

Marvell announced on 5 January that its accelerated chips (XPUs) can dramatically boost AI server performance by integrating CPO (co-packaged optics) technology, expanding the scale of interconnections from tens of XPUs within a single rack to hundreds across multiple racks.The company's CEO, Matt Murphy, said that Marvell is on track to achieve its $25bn by FY2026 sales target for AI networking and custom processor chips.

03. Solidigm Discontinues Production of Consumer SSDs

On 7 January, SemiMedia reported that Solidigm has officially ceased production of its P44 Pro and P41 Plus consumer SSDs, and is expected to exit the market. Its website no longer displays consumer storage products, but instead focuses on its data centre SSD business, labelled as ‘Solidigm enterprise SSD’ in Google searches, and a Solidigm representative said that last year it had told its customers that the P41 Plus and P44 Pro were the last of its consumer products, and advised them to switch to SK Hynix. Solidigm will focus on data centre products.

Solidigm will focus on data centre SSDs, becoming the leader in high-capacity eSSDs for AI deployments and offering a broad portfolio of products for AI data pipelines and general-purpose computing workloads.

Original Manufacturer Updates:LG Electronics, Samsung, Kyocera

04. LG Electronics partners with Microsoft to push AI solutions

LG Electronics announced its strategic partnership with Microsoft at its world premiere event on the eve of CES 2025 in Las Vegas on 6 January.LG plans to leverage Microsoft AI technologies in conjunction with data from its diverse ecosystem of products spanning the home, vehicle and commercial spaces, focusing on the development of AI agents that can enhance the user experience in spaces such as the home, vehicle, hospitality and office.

LG has integrated Microsoft speech recognition and synthesis technology for smooth customer interaction into its mobile AI home centre Q9, which recognises different accents, pronunciations and spoken expressions. The two companies plan to develop AI agents that understand, interact with and anticipate user needs and preferences.

05. Samsung's Q4 profit slips on weak memory demand and falling prices

On 8 January, Samsung Electronics reported fourth-quarter 2024 operating profit of around 6.5 trillion won ($4.4 billion), below analysts' forecasts of $5.8 billion and down sharply from the $8.2 billion it predicted in August. Some South Korean analysts believe the company may be in a cyclical trough, while others warn of semiconductor market challenges or extend into the first half of 2025. As China's old DRAM supply is expected to increase by more than 50 per cent this year, competition in the semiconductor market has intensified, and the commodity DRAM market may deteriorate, causing the company's losses to deepen.

06. Kyocera plans to sell $1.3 billion of low-growth businesses and invest in new parts plants

Kyocera plans to divest about $1.3 billion of non-core businesses in response to weak demand, SemiMedia reported on 9 January. The businesses, which will be sold by March 2026, account for 10 per cent of total revenue and the company is more profit-heavy, according to president Hideo Tanemoto. Kyocera expects net profit to fall 30% to 71 billion yen in the March 2025 fiscal year due to poor automotive capacitors and semiconductor packaging. in October 2024, the company announced a division between core and non-core businesses and a gradual exit from non-core areas. To support growth, Kyocera will invest 68 billion yen in a new plant in Nagasaki Prefecture to produce semiconductor parts.

Industry information: Apple、Asus、Aacer

07. Apple's 3nm wafer cost soars to $18,000

On 6 January, according to Creative Strategies CEO Ben Bajarin, Apple's A-series chips evolved from the A7 (28nm) in 2013 to the A18 Pro (3nm) in 2024, increasing the number of transistors from 1bn to 20bn. the A7's 28nm wafers cost $5,000, while the A18 Pro s 3nm wafer cost soared to $18,000, 3.6 times that of the A7. The cost per square millimetre rose from $0.07 for the A7 to $0.25 for the A18 Pro.

08. ASUS and Acer's 2024 revenues shine, ASUS benefits from AI server growth of more than 20 %

The Economic Daily News reported on 10 January that the PC industry recovered slowly in 2024, but both Acer and Asus returned to the growth track, with annual revenue growth of 9.7% and 21.49% respectively. Asus December group revenue of 47.411 billion yuan, a monthly decrease of 14.5%, an annual increase of 35.9%; fourth quarter revenue of 152.799 billion yuan, a quarterly decrease of 8.26%, an annual increase of 27.16%; annual revenue of 585.962 billion yuan, an annual increase of 21.49%. ASUS launched a number of new products at CES 2025, including gaming notebooks with new GPUs and AI PCs, such as the world's lightest Copilot+ PC, the ‘Zenbook A14’, which uses Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X-series processor and is expected to hit the market in the first quarter.

As for Acer, December consolidated revenue was NT$24.553 billion, a monthly increase of 7.9% and an annual increase of 3.7%; fourth-quarter revenue was NT$66.122 billion, a quarterly decrease of 9% and an annual increase of 4.7%; and full-year revenue was NT$264.708 billion, an annual increase of 9.7%. Acer's non-computer and display-related businesses accounted for 29.3% of fourth-quarter revenue, up 14.2% year-over-year, and 28.3% of full-year revenue, up 15.5% year-over-year. New business highlights under incubation include Antus Technology and Acer Smartcom, which performed well in the AI server and workstation, and Smartcom businesses, respectively.

09. Biden tightens NVIDIA AI chip exports

According to a Bloomberg report on 9 January, the Biden administration plans to impose a new round of restrictions on the export of artificial intelligence chips from companies such as NVIDIA in the days leading up to its departure from office, in a last-ditch effort to stop the flow of advanced technology to China and Russia.

The new rules will establish a three-tier system of chip trade restrictions, with the first tier being a handful of U.S. allies with free access to U.S. chips; the second tier being the vast majority of the world's countries and territories, which will face a total computing power limit of only about 50,000 GPUs per country and territory for the period of 2025 to 2027, but could be subject to higher ceilings by meeting the U.S. government's security and human rights standards; and the third tier, which will be China, Russia, and other 24 countries and territories, which will be subject to a total ban on importing U.S. chips.