Sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment rose 14 percent to $64.5 billion in 2018 from $56.62 billion in 2017, industry association SEMI said.

The report said Korea has claimed the largest market for new semiconductor equipment with $17.71 billion in sales.

China has become the second largest semiconductor equipment market — for the first time — with sales of $13.11 billion. China has displaced Taiwan in the global semiconductor equipment market. The report said Taiwan fell to the third position with sales of $10.17 billion.

A Reuters report in April 2018 said China has made chip development a key plank of its Made in China 2025 drive to bolster its strength in technology against more developed rivals in the United States, Japan and Europe.

China government, which does not want to depend on Europe or the US, wants local chips to make up at least 40 percent of China’s semiconductor needs by the middle of the next decade. China imported $227 billion worth of integrated circuits in 2016.

China is looking to attract talent, though still had less than half the 700,000 semiconductor experts it needed to really compete in the chipset market, Jeter Teo, research director at the tech analytics consultancy Trendforce, said earlier.

Chinese demand for semiconductor manufacturing equipment has not slackened, despite a slowdown in the country’s economic growth and trade frictions with the United States, ASML Holding CEO Peter Wennink said.

Semiconductor equipment spending

Annual spending rates for semiconductor equipment increased for China, Japan, Rest of World (primarily Southeast Asia), Europe, and North America.

However, new semiconductor equipment markets in Taiwan and South Korea contracted. The 2018 equipment market rankings for Japan, North America, Europe, and Rest of World remained unchanged from 2017.

Sales for the global wafer processing equipment market segment rose 15 percent while other front-end segment sales grew 9 percent. Total test equipment sales increased 20 percent as assembly and packaging sales increased 2 percent.

Baburajan K