Although the demand on personal computers and related devices is flat, the other markets still drive the semiconductor industry upwards. According to this report from SIA over at SiliconStrategies, global semiconductor sales reached $12.5 billion in October 2002, a 1.8% sequential increase from the $12.3 billion in revenue achieved in September 2002 and a 20% increase from the $10.4 billion total recorded in October 2001.

The market grew 6.2% in Europe, 1% in the Asia-Pacific region, approximately 2% in Japan and just about 0.5% in the Americas. The trends are conditioned by strong demand on wireless accessories in Europe and continuing migration of electronic equipment production from US-based facilities to the Asia-Pacific region.

Needless to say that the popularity of different handheld wireless devices brings the demand on the components like flash memory or DSPs to the levels never seen before. The flash memory sales were up 6.9% and DSP sales were up 4.4% in October. In fact, DRAM market and CPU markets also experience growth: 1.2% and 6.5% respectively that is still not bad at all. The semiconductor market grew 5.6% in the first quarter, 5.8% in the second and 8.2% in 2002's third quarter. Although the growth pace always slows down in the final quarter, the market still moves upwards.

The semiconductor trends just again claim that the growth of the personal computer market is rather modest and is not likely to skyrocket until the software in general can take advantage of the powerful hardware we have.