The Semiconductor Industry Association reported third-quarter global semiconductor sales of $517.7 billion, 24.1% above the second quarter. September alone came to $172.6 billion, 7.9% above August and 146.8% above September a year earlier. Michael Robbins, the association’s president and chief executive, noted that sales have now grown by more than 20% quarter on quarter for three consecutive quarters.
The regional figures are equally stark. Measured year on year for September, sales into the Americas rose 191.7%, Asia Pacific and other markets 141.4%, China 124.9%, Europe 102.5% and Japan 73.4%. The association reports on a three-month moving average, which smooths the monthly noise rather than removing it.
Growth like this is not a broad recovery, and it would be a mistake to read it as one. A large share of it is memory and accelerators sold into data centres at prices that have themselves risen sharply, which inflates revenue without a matching increase in units of everything else. A regulator or a connector maker is not living through a 146% boom.
What the number does reliably indicate is contention. Revenue of this size pulls wafer starts, substrates, packaging and test capacity towards whoever pays most, and the parts that lose that competition are ordinary ones. Which is why, for most projects, the useful response to a record quarter is to re-check availability on the dullest items in the bill of materials.
One caveat on the arithmetic. These figures are revenue, not volume, and in a year when memory prices have more than doubled the two have decoupled badly. Reading unit demand out of a revenue series in this market will mislead anyone forecasting from it.