Global sales of semiconductors rose 13 percent in the first quarter, helped by demand for chips used in mobile phones and personal computers, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) said.
Worldwide chip sales climbed to US$55.3 billion in the first three months from a year earlier, the group said in an e-mailed statement today. March sales gained 2.2 percent to US$18.4 billion from the previous month.
Global sales in the first quarter rose 0.4 percent from the fourth quarter, San Jose, California-based SIA said. In January, the group had forecast worldwide sales would fall between 4 percent and 6 percent in the quarter from the last three months of last year.
"We expect sales in this quarter will be flat to nominally higher than the first quarter," SIA president George Scalise said in the statement. "As we reported last month, our earlier prediction for flat sales for the year as a whole now appears to have been overly cautious."
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