Report Shows Game Consoles Key Part Of Semi-Conductor Growth

A new report by market research firm In-Stat has concluded that the semiconductor industry will continue to experience strong growth for the rest of the decade, after the disappointing years of 2001 and 2002, in part led by the increasing penetration of video game consoles and other game-compatible devices. The report suggests that sales of video game consoles bottomed out in 2005 at 16.5 million units, and that the launch of the next generation of formats will double the size of the market by 2009. In addition, the cellphone market, which increasingly encompasses mobile games, was singled out as a massive growth market. Finally, the PC semi-conductor market in general is also described as being “not dead”, with 100 million CPUs being sold in 2002 and an estimated 187.3 million in 2005. The fastest-growing silicon category was estimated as being wireless cellular modems, with 2.5 million units shipped in 2004 to 14.6 million in 2009, followed by wireless LAN chipsets (84 million units shipped in 2004 to 390 million units in 2009) and digital TV sets (16.5 million units shipped in 2004 to 93.8 million units in 2009). The PDA market, however, was characterized as a “dying product line”, as the functionality of the devices is absorbed into smartphones, with shipment levels decreasing by almost two-thirds from 2005 to 2009. "Cellular technology in particular, will continue to be a major growth engine through the remainder of the decade," said In-Stat analyst Chris Kissel. "The potential market for arguably the most successful consumer product of all time, the cellular handset, will grow from 1.6 billion cellular phone subscribers worldwide to 2.6 billion subscribers by 2009. That will represent one-third of the world's population."