Electronica: Europe strong in chips, but UK wobbles

The quarter ended with sales of €1.81bn which was a decline of 0.9%, mainly due to different quarter-end reporting by some members.

The worrying news for the UK market, where the effect of the Brexit vote are coming into play, is a decline in the market of  10.5% in euro terms due to the weakening exchange rate.

The market was flat in pound terms.

Georg Steinberger

The German semiconductor market dropped by 4.4% to €570m, France went down slightly by 1.4% to €124m.

Georg Steinberger, chairman of DMASS, writes:

“The trends remain stable: UK is in Brexit trouble, France and Germany experience summer season combined with little inspiration from the overall market, Nordic has its mix of production transfer and summer slowdown.

What remains is an unusually strong South (Italy and Iberia) and more low-cost-production driven growth in many Eastern European countries. Overall, the market is slow but not bad and 2016 heads towards a single-digit growth of around 3%.”

Steinberger still believes that 2016 is more resilient to currency effects and wider economic conditions than 2015 proved to be.

“Without the technical effect of different quarter-end dates for some DMASS members, Q3/CY16 would have been positive, in a similar ballpark as Q2CY16,” said Steinberger.

In the products groups reported by DMASS, the only major ones with positive news were analogue and microprocessors/microcontrollers.

Analogue grew by 1.5%, micros by 0.8% to €390m.

Programmable logic and other logic remain weak.

Steinberger writes:

“Same as last quarter, some special effects influence some distributors in certain product areas, like RF, programmable logic and other logic (business taken direct by manufacturers). However, on the positive side, there are product areas, which are really promising, like high-end microcontrollers, some higher end analogue products and sensors, all of which are key components to the quickly developing IoT market.”