According to market watch team of hqew.net, 49 wafer technology factories in all are shut down over the past 3 years (2009 – 2011).

The most direct reason lead to current situations the close of the upstream suppliers and the upgrading of wafer in small size, transition to a more cost-effective large size wafer production creations, our  senior analyst David suggested. 

In addition, somesemiconductormanufacturers closed plants reason just because they are upgrading of product line to excessive to large size wafer and the non-IC products production.

In the next few years, it is expected that more and more semiconductor enterprise will close their lower factory capacity and thus turn to light wafer mode or complete non-wafer, added by David.

In the 2009-2011 three years, for the closed 49 wafer plants, 21 are 150-mm wafer factories, 13 200-mm wafer factories, 7 125-mm wafer plants and 3 100-mm wafer factories.

In fact, five of them are 300-mm wafer factory.

According to the regions that the closed wafer plants located, there are 17 factories located in Japan and North America, 12 in Euro and south Korea. What is notable is that, one of them is the 300-mm wafer factory owe by Sony, which is now used to manufacture the image sensor chips.

Main editor suggestion:

Our main editor suggested that , even more fierce market competition is happening due to the global economy downside and semiconductor giant break-neck. Quite a lot of wafer manufacturers are hard to move on their businesses when compared to the huge profits of the giant semiconductor intel. Simply changing the enterprise business model (to light wafer or the non-IC mode) has been difficult to compete, and it is expected in the next 10 years, this will see more hard conditions in this market.