“The demand for semiconductor manufacturing equipment has been declining due to the sudden decrease in booking after July, and the related gas supply facilities also shows a substantial drop by 20 to 30% compared with the previous month.

According to the recent Book-to-Bill ratio in July (provisional), both Japan and the United States dropped the ratio to 0.89 compared with 0.95 of the previous month. In terms of booking, Japanese semiconductor equipment amounted to 84.832 billion yen down by 7.5% compared with the previous year, and U.S. equipment to 1.28 billion dollars down by 10.2%.

During the first and second quarters both U.S. and Japan attained a stable condition in sales and booking in the gas-related machinery market for manufacturing equipment, because the demand for semiconductor equipment in Korea and Taiwan was growing steadily.

However, the declined booking of semiconductor manufacturing equipment became noticeable suddenly from the end of June. It followed that the manufacturing equipment producers substantially decreased their orders to be placed with gas-related machinery manufacturers. They decreased by 20 to 30% compared with the previous month, though different depending upon equipment manufacturers.

The largest reason is that there was a sudden braking in the capital investment for the semiconductor manufacturing equipment for the Korean demand which had been driving the market of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Especially, Samsung Electronics has postponed the construction of its production line for the organic electroluminescence display, in the same way as the postponement of last year.

When it comes to the cause of declination, it is rumoured to have been attributed to the forced production adjustment due to the economic downturn in Europe and China or to the declined demand for flash memories or small-sized liquid crystals due to the dispute on the patent of smartphone against Apple. It is also no more than a conjecture that the preferential treatments may be re-examined depending on the result of the coming Korean presidential election.

However, there is another movement about Apple’s iPhone 5 or New iPad that Japanese companies like Japan Display for liquid crystal and Toshiba for flash memories have turned out to be top suppliers. Furthermore, LG (Korea) and AUO (Taiwan) for liquid crystal became the second-running vendors, which might well be taken at a glance as a movement to throw off Samsung. It is also said that Sony’s CMOS Sensors have a great share for the smartphone market taking a strong position to Apple.

It is a favorable news in respect of the domestic gas demand that Japanese products are being used, but there is no change in the continuous dependence upon Korea and Taiwan in the field of gas-related machinery for production equipment and the serious situation still goes on.”