On April 26, ICInsights latest report pointed out that the sales of volatile DRAM and flash memory continue to strongly influence the entire IC market.

In the report, ICInsights demonstrated how the entire memory market has driven the overall growth of the IC market over the past two years, and noted that memory will have a very negative impact on overall IC market growth in 2019. The DRAM and NAND flash markets have the same strong cyclicality as the IC industry. The market cycle is mainly affected by capital expenditures and capacity fluctuations. ICInsights predicts that the cyclicality of the DRAM market in 2019 will remain extremely unstable.

DRAM is the largest single product in the semiconductor industry in 2018, with a market value of $99.4 billion and a second-largest NAND flash memory of only $40 billion.

Since 2013, the memory market has been a driving force for global IC market growth in the year, and only once has had a negative impact. In 2017, the memory market grew by 64%, driving the IC market to grow at a total rate of 14%. Although the memory market began to slow down in the fourth quarter in 2018, it only increased by 26% for the whole year, but it still pushed the IC market to grow by a very impressive 6 percentage points.

ICInsights pointed out that by 2019, the memory market is expected to become a negative factor in the growth of the global IC market. This year, the memory market is expected to decline by 24% (down 38.6 billion US dollars), and the expected sharp decline in the memory market will reduce the overall IC market growth rate by 9%. Excluding memory, it is expected that the IC market will not grow (0%) this year, which is the same as last year.