Global chip sales rise 5% amid price cutting

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- World-wide semiconductor sales rose 5 percent in October from a year earlier because of industry wide price cutting, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Sales rose to 23.1 billion U.S. dollars, compared with 22 billion dollars a year earlier and 22.6 billion dollars in September, the Semiconductor Industry Association said.

For the first 10 months this year, chip sales rose 3.9 percent from a year earlier to 210.5 billion dollars. Last month, the group forecast a growth of 3.8 percent for the year.

"Consumers are reaping huge benefits from continued rapid price attrition in key sectors of the semiconductor market," said George Scalise, the association's president.

He said, for example, despite a 55 percent increase in unit shipments this year, dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, revenues are up only 4 percent. DRAM is a type of high-capacity memory.

The Asian-Pacific region, excluding Japan, saw growth in chip sales of 8.5 percent in October. That was followed by Japan at 6.6percent and Europe at 2.2 percent. The Americas saw a 3.1 percent drop in sales.

In the personal-computer sector, unit sales of microprocessors were up 15 percent for the first 10 months of the year, Scalise said.

Revenue, however, was up only 4 percent because of price cutting.