China-US tariff tiff, Brexit, and a crap economy: Why OEMs spent $56bn less on semiconductors last year

Almost all of the top 10 biggest corporate consumers of semiconductors bought fewer chips last year due to softening economies, in part caused by political uncertainty: Brexit and the US-China trade battle among them. Numbers crunched by Gartner show the overall sector shrank by 11.9 per cent year-on-year to $474.631bn – …

[macjules]

Semiconductor sales are forecast to bounce this year

Do hope this does not turn out to be a Dead Panda bounce.

[W.S.Gosset]

XIAO MI THE MONEY!

> The sole company in the top 10 to increase spending in real terms was Xiaomi

Oh.

Right.... Rightio then. Good-o.

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: XIAO MI THE MONEY!

(Hmm. Maybe doing a pun reliant on people knowing how to pronounce "Xiaomi" wasn't such a good idea after all :D )

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese tat bazaar?

My Xiaomi scales are better made and more accurate than the more expensive Salter ones that preceded them. I just don't use the BT connection.

[Mr. Nanook]

"The trade war between China and the US looks to be abating, though with a certain unpredictable orange-faced loon in the White House..."

The author is entitled to express his opinion but the above statement strikes me as childish.

Derogatory remarks aren't required in an article about the semiconductor market.

[Holtsmark]

Please inform me which bit of the statement is childish?

"The trade war between China and the US looks to be abating" ..I can not determine whether this is accurate, but I can not see anthing childish about it..

"though with a certain" ..words

"unpredictable" see exhibit A

"orange-faced" see exhibits B to ZZ

"loon" .. if implying waterfowl, then inaccurate.. if implying nutcase, then I refer to the The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library, as well as many many hamberders, umbrellas, invisible F35s, truck-horns etcetera .

"in the White House" ..regrettable, but not childish.

Having not experienced the cold war at its deadliest heights, I have only for the last 3 years started to feel some of the exsistential fear of not knowing wheter someone, on a whim, will screw up for all of us tomorrow. It is not a nice feeling.

The senate missed a great opportunity to make the world a safer place yesterday.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Senate did not miss any opportunity. You think they want to make the world a safer place?

You want to know which country is the biggest exporter of terror? The US exports as much in the way of arms as the next 4 countries combined*. It accounts for 40% of world arms exports. And that pales besides what it spends on its own armaments.

If peace ever really breaks out, it is very bad news for American politicians and lobbyists.

*Russia, France, Germany and Spain. The UK is falling down the terror export league table at number 8.

[Spanners]

"all but decimated Huawei's handset business outside of China"

Their phones are cheaper than ever. This is good for the consumer. I just bought a P30 "lite". It means that US spooks will find it harder to spy on me. In case Chinese ones fancy doing so, I will not call any government types or have national defence plans on it!

All that Huawei stuff was an attempt at trade protectionism. It has sweet FA to do with security. I would be much unhappier if the CIA, NSA and other crooks found it too easy to connect into my phone, read it and sell the results to other US corporations.