After the “SEMICONJapan2014” held for three days from December 3, the organizer SEMI hosted a press conference in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan located at Yuraku-cho Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, including also the aim of demonstration.

The attendees were Mitsunobu Koshiba, president of JSR and chairperson of SEMICON JAPAN promotion committee, Andrew Wylegala, senior commercial officer for the US Commercial Service at the Embassy of the US, Jonathan Davis, vice president of JSR International and Osamu Nakamura representing SEMI Japan.

Chairperson Koshiba said in his opening remarks, “I forecast the number of exhibitors to be 725 up by 8% and visitors to be 3,500 up by 10% over last year respectively. I think that the expected increase of visitors over last year has been arisen by people’s interest in the contents of the new plan. As Chikatomo Hodo president of Accenture will refer in his address on Digital Revolution in the opening keynote on the first day, digitalization will become a mega trend in the future and the consequently caused high awareness of data value will turn out to be a pulling force for the semiconductor industry.”

Andrew Wylegala, representing the US Embassy which joined as an official sponsor for the first time in the exhibition arrangement with its booth and participation in the IT Forum on the second day, commented that he would enhance his support to promote investments from Japan to the States as well as US companies’ participation in the SEMICON Japan which seems to grow more from now on. Jonathan Davis vice president of JSR International described the market trend of semiconductor production facilities and materials. While the semiconductor IC market in 2012 amounted to 292 billion dollars, the market in 2013 turned out to mark 306 billion dollars reaching the “Big 300” level. In 2014 the figure rose up to 327 billion dollars up 6.8%.

Although the demand for tablets is diminishing as a reaction to the rapid growth, there has been an improvement in the demand for PC and the business for servers, DRAM and NAND is growing rather in a satisfactory condition. The scale of business is expected to get larger up to 350 billion dollars in 2015. There will be a continuous growth in various applications from now on. The sales of semiconductor production facilities (brand-new) mainly for memories will probably amount to 38 billion dollars up 19.3% over last year in 2014 and up 15.2% in 2015. Regarding the market of semiconductor materials in 2014, its scale is 44.62 billion dollars (Japan shares 16% the same as Korea following Taiwan of 22%) and is expected to be 46.6 billion dollars up 4% in 2015.