Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties continue to affect the foundry industry's development while the rapid rise of high-performance computing (HPC) applications also propels foundries' research of advanced fabrication and packaging technologies.
Amid the semiconductor market downturn, the 2023 global foundry revenue is set to decline to US$121.5 billion, down 13.8%. Going into 2024, the global foundry revenue may show a rebound but poor macroeconomic conditions on top of geopolitical risks will continue to curtail the foundry industry's growth.
Despite the short-term headwinds, the foundry industry still enjoys strong HPC chip demand as well as increasing semiconductor usage in 5G and EV applications. Furthermore, thanks to the ongoing trends of in-house chip development, IDMs continuing to outsource their chip production and new foundry capacities becoming available, the outlook for the foundry industry's mid-to-long-term growth remains promising.
Table 1: Key factors affecting the global wafer foundry industry: Demand side
Table 2: Key factors affecting the global wafer foundry industry: Supply side
Chart 1: Economic growth of global and major markets, 2022-2028
Table 4: Pure-play foundries mature nodes capacity expansions
Table 5: Capacity investment in Japan by pure-play foundries
Table 7: Transistor manufacturing technology adopted by top foundries, 2021-2028
