Even amid a global chip shortage, the semiconductor industry continues to reach new highs in terms of sales. In this Motley Fool Live segment from "Semiconductor Revolution," recorded on Feb. 17, Fool contributors Nicholas Rossolillo, Jose Najarro, and Danny Vena discuss the astounding growth in the semiconductor chip market.
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Nicholas Rossolillo: News this week came out from the Semiconductor Industry Association. Sales actually reached or surpassed $500 billion globally for the first time. I've got a chart here that shows what those sales look like over the last, I don't know, roughly decade and a half, as well as expectations for this year, for 2022. You can see in 2021, almost 540 billion in sales. Really, really big jump over the last few years, and we're still in the midst of the chip shortage. So there is some expectations that we might reach 600 billion this year.
Again, just really big double-digit growth and it's compounding. But I think this is to be expected because, I know Danny is going to talk about Intel here in a bit, but their new-ish CEO, Pat Gelsinger, last quarter said that he sees global chip sales reaching one trillion dollars by the end of this decade. So we're really not that far off anymore at this point, and we can see the cyclicality from year to year in this industry. But like we talk about a lot, higher lows and higher highs, this is a secular growth trend. It's the building blocks of technology. A lot of good stuff happening here in the semiconductor industry.
Jose Najarro: Yeah. Like you mentioned, Nick, I definitely heard numerous CEOs of companies share that same thought that by the end of this decade, we're going to hit that one trillion dollar. I think it's a great thing that you mentioned that, hey, it's not going to be a straight line. It doesn't mean every year from now is going to be a straight line. Sometimes we are going to get the cyclicality of semiconductor. So there might be a year where we might fall off. But it does seem from that chart, we are hitting higher lows each time. Danny, any thoughts on the overall sales numbers?
Danny Vena: The thing that stands out for me is the fact that we have, for the past year, probably longer, been talking about a chip shortage, and yet we're hitting new highs in terms of chip sales. I suspect that the numbers would have been significantly higher if we had been able to meet capacity over the course of the last year. I suspect as the logistics and supply chain issues iron themselves out, we've been on a downturn in terms of new cases of COVID, and I think once we see the solid growth in the chip market that I think we should have seen over the past year, I think the numbers are going to be much higher than perhaps people expect.
