Taiwan’s Lite-On Technology Corp. (Lite-On) announced on August 30 that it will offload the entire stake of its SSD business to Toshiba Memory Holdings Corp. (TMCHD). The purchase price is provisionally set at US$165 million, and the transaction is scheduled to be completed by 1H20. TrendForce’s preliminary assessment of this deal finds that Lite-On’s SSD business has significant advantages in operational efficiency and flexibility. Thus, the acquisition could be a major boon to TMCHD in terms of enhancing the range and quality of product offerings.
According to the newest statistics by TrendForce, the global top ten IC design companies for 2Q19 ranked by revenue have just been released, in which we see revenues of the top five all falling YoY. This was due to the US-China trade war, mounting inventory levels along the supply chain and less-than-satisfactory global demand for consumer electronics, including smartphones, tablets, notebooks, LCDs, TVs, servers etc. NVIDIA registered the largest decline among the five: 20.1%. This is also the first time in three years that Nvidia's seen YoY revenue declines for three consecutive quarters.
According to investigations by TrendForce, smartphone demand has already made it out of the gloomy offseason of 2Q19, with production volume coming to 344 million units, a 10.5% QoQ growth. Yet the many uncertainties circulating in the international market still caused smartphone production volume to weaken by 2.4% YoY in 2Q19, with the top six being Samsung, Huawei, Apple, OPPO, Xiaomi and Vivo in descending order.
According to the newest 2019 Global Automotive LED Market Report- Passenger Car and Box Truck report by LEDinside, a division of TrendForce, the global automotive market has been showing declines since 2018 amid global trade frictions and economic recessions, but the penetration rates of LEDs in various major automotive lighting products continued to rise. Furthermore, new energy cars have a greater demand for LEDs than traditional cars do while boasting a faster growth in shipments. This will cause the volume of and revenue for automotive LED products to maintain modest growth in future years, with global automotive LED revenue forecast to arrive at US$3.17 billion in 2019 and to register a CAGR of 7% during the forecast period 2018-2023.
According to the latest global DRAM module supplier rankings by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, although DRAM prices took a downturn in 2H18, ASP for the whole year came above 10% in 2017. Along with the increase in shipments, this put total revenue for the global module market 2018 at US$16.6 billion, a 41% increase YoY.
