April North American semiconductor equipment billings hit 4-month high, but YoY deficit expands
On May 21, SEMI released its monthly Equipment Market Data Subscription Billings Report for the month of April, showing that North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted worldwide billings of $1.91 billion last month (on a three-month average basis).
That figure is up 4.7% from March's $1.82 billion and is the highest since December 2018's $2.10 billion—snapping a three-month streak decline month-over-month—but the year-over-year decline accelerated for an 11th-straight month. April 2019's billings were down 29.0% year-over-year compared to April 2018's $2.69 billion. That disparity was worse than March 2019's -24.9%, and was the fifth-straight month that North America manufactureres semiconductor equipment billings were down year-over-year.
Still, SEMI is optimistic.
“April billings of North American equipment manufacturers increased 5% when compared to the prior month,” said Ajit Manocha, president and CEO of SEMI. “While it is premature to call this upturn an inflection point in this cycle, the current improvement clearly reflects expenditures for advancing technology roadmaps.”
The SEMI Billings report uses three-month moving averages of worldwide billings for North American-based semiconductor equipment manufacturers. See the past 12 months of semiconductor billings and their year-to-year comparison below. Billings are in U.S. dollars and in billions.
Source: SEMI
SEMI publishes a monthly North American Billings report and issues the WorldwideSemiconductor Equipment Market Statistics (WWSEMS) report in collaboration with the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan (SEAJ). The WWSEMS report currently reports billings by 24 equipment segments and by seven end market regions. SEMI also has a long history of tracking semiconductor industry fab investments in detail on a company-by-company and fab-by-fab basis in its World Fab Forecast and SEMI FabView databases.
