Due to the sluggish business in Korea and Taiwan, the market of electronics gas and equipment is suffering a sudden braking now. In the gas market, the gas consumption by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) of Taiwan and Samsung Electronics of Korea is in a downturn trend as their production lines have been adjusted. Affected by the decreased sales of end-products like smart phones and tablets, the reduction of production started all at once, resulting in direct damaging to the specialty gas demand.

Neon is a typical gas in this trend. Gas suppliers had been busy to find a way to procure neon until the summer of this year, but the situation changed so suddenly and turned out to be unstrained. It is rumored that neon was released for sale from Samsung and TSMC who had suffered too much stock of Ukrainian origin. Apart from whether it is true or not, the decrease in production is proven by the trend of gas consumption. Furthermore, it seems that Chinese companies having large-scaled ASU plants have introduced neon recovery equipment taking a gamble on the tight supply of neon in one chorus and approached to Japan to sell the gas. Therefore, there occurred a change added to the supply-side situation. They say the offered price was so high that no business took place. However, the existence of Chinese-origin neon may exert on demand/supply balance from now on.

Not so much like this, the mood of tightness in supply of C4F6, WF6 or NF3 has got less strained than before. It is one of the reasons at last that logistics and consumer stocks have increased to cope with a decrease in the production line and a tight supply condition.

The decreased production affects exports as the dependence on export of specialty gas manufacturers is about 70% on the average. They suffer to find how to deal with the matter just while the profitability is getting recovered a little owing to the devalued yen.

The situation is more serious in the gas supply equipment manufacturers. Before June semiconductor manufacturers showed an aggressive forecast of 15% increase for this year. However, there occurred a hard attack of the influences by the postponed or reconsidered capital investments of the Korean and Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers like Samsung Electronics or TSMC.

From July there had already been a gradual downturn trend in the number of orders received by all the equipment manufacturers, and in October the number of orders suddenly dropped to cause reviewing even the business plan for the latter half of the fiscal term. It is unforeseeable now how long the trend will last.

It was a forecast shown by the equipment manufacturers at the beginning of the year that there would be no rapid decline because of the expanded demand causing shortage of memory for the time being. However, it seems to disappoint our expectation again.

On the other hand, however, the Japanese market is not so seriously sluggish as Korea and Taiwan. In fact, the capital investment stays normal as seen in Toshiba Yokkaichi, Sony Semiconductor Nagasaki and Yamagata or Micron Japan Higashi Hiroshima.

The difference in BB ratio between Japan and the US develops some concern. The SEMI statistics shows a recovery trend in North America with 0.98 in June, 1.02 in July and 1.06 in August, while the SEAJ statistics shows a downturn trend of Japan with 1.18 in June, 0.97 in July and 0.88 in August. The trend is quite opposite.

It is ambiguous which of North America or Japan will become a leading indicator or whether there will be active investments with the background of booming economy in American semiconductor manufacturers like Intel or Micron and universities or research institutes.