According to the IC Insights survey, even if COVID-19 has a catastrophic impact on the global economy, it is expected that after a 15% drop last year, the global IC market will still achieve single-digit growth in 2020.

From 1984 to 2019, the average seasonality of the IC market in the first quarter fell continuously to 2%. IC Insights pointed out that compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, the market fell by only 3% in the first quarter of 2020, slightly below the 36-year average.

Excluding the years following the severe decline of the IC industry in 1985 and 2001, IC Insights believes that the 1Q/4Q IC market change is the best indicator of the direction and intensity of the annual IC market change. Because the actual changes in 1Q/4Q will not directly predict the final annual growth of the IC market in a given year, but will accurately describe the expected direction and intensity of the IC market's annual growth rate compared with the previous year.

IC Insights believes that in view of the typical seasonal characteristics of the IC industry, the first quarter essentially laid the "foundation" for the future quarterly growth of the IC market. In general, when the 1Q/4Q performance of a given year is better than the 1Q/4Q performance of the previous year, it can be expected that the annual growth rate for that year will be higher than the previous year. When this year's 1Q/4Q performance was worse than the same period last year, the situation was just the opposite.

Since the IC market change in 1Q20/4Q19 quarter is -3%, far better than the 1Q19/4Q18 IC market change of -17%, IC Insights believes that even taking into account the negative impact of COVID, the annual growth rate of the IC market in 2020 ( 3%) may be much better than the 15% decline in the IC market in 2019.