According to the latest “Solar Powering Taiwan: Special Report” by EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce, Taiwan's PV installations made it past the 1GW mark for the first time in 2018, attracting many investors to set up PV power plants in Taiwan. The Bureau of Energy has therefore increased their installation goal for 2019 to 1.5GW. In order to reach this goal, they will be focusing on four big areas: Taiwan Sugar demonstration projects; industrial factory roofing promotion projects; large developer promotion projects; and projects applied for approval in 2018.
The overview given by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, on the performance of the NAND flash market for 2Q19 finds that end demand in smartphone, notebook PC and server markets have recovered from the traditional offseason 1Q19, bringing total bit consumption growth to 15%. But since suppliers still have rather large levels of inventory on their hands, the drop in contract prices for 2Q19 have remained quite significant. Total business revenue remained around the US$10.8 billion mark, trending flat from 1Q19.
With consumers beginning to seek customization and autonomous consumption and the lack of labor becoming a growing problem at the manufacturing end, manufacturers are spurred to become adaptive to a quickly-shifting and widely-varying environment as manufacturing systems become more sophisticated than ever. Thanks to the ripened, new technology, manufacturers may deploy advanced sensing technology in conjunction with AI algorithms and robots to raise information visibility and system controllability, furthering the development of smart manufacturing for Industry 4.0. According to forecasts by TrendForce, the global market scale for smart manufacturing will register a CAGR of 10.7% up to 2022 and near US$370 billion.
According to investigations by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, quote trends for various products, including commodity DRAM, server DRAM and consumer DRAM, fell by nearly 30%, with the exception of discrete mobile DRAM/ eMCP products, whose declines fell within the 10-20% range. Server DRAM prices suffered the steepest fall, registering a near-35% decline. Observing the market, we see that although 2Q sales bit grew over the previous quarter, quotes kept on falling, causing total DRAM revenue to fall by 9.1% QoQ in 2Q.
According to the latest notebook shipments report by TrendForce, concerns over the US-China trade dispute and the Intel CPU shortage originally casted a conservative cloud over the overall outlook for market in 2Q19. Yet three factors played a role in pushing 2Q shipments to 41.5 million units to give an expectation-exceeding QoQ growth of 12.1%: (1) AMD CPUs are being substituted for Intel CPUs; (2) Chromebooks find increased demand in the form of tenders; and (3) worries arising from the trade dispute moved brands to stock up anticipatorily.
