Market Insight


2025 semiconductor market review: key metrics, stabilisation trends, and a look to the future


By Thomas Foj, vice president supplier management, solutions, and digitalisation EMEA, Avnet Silica F


or the electronics industry, data is not simply an output; it is the fuel that powers design, manufacturing, and innovation. Every autonomous system, smart device, and AI-driven application relies on streams of information, from the smallest sensor reading to the most complex inference.


Beyond this data lies another critical form of intelligence: market data. Understanding supply chains, pricing dynamics, and investment flows is as fundamental to industry strategy as knowing transistor characteristics or memory latency. Avnet Silica’s Trendliner reports provide this perspective, tracking lead times, component availability, and pricing across product families and regions, quarter by quarter. Throughout 2025, four quarterly Trendliner reports captured the evolving contours of the semiconductor landscape. They reveal how global and European markets shifted, which component families experienced pressure, and how supply chains began to stabilise. In this article, we examine these patterns, exploring Trendliner data to reveal how 2025 established a new baseline for the industry and what it may signal for 2026.


Understanding 2025


In 2025 the global semiconductor market traced a path from contraction toward stabilisation, reflecting a year in which the industry recalibrated its expectations. Q1 opened with a served market of $401 billion1


Figure 1 - Q1 global semiconductor outlook by region, (excludes DRAM, flash, MPU compute, GPU, AI processors)


From a market perspective, this pattern can be seen more as compression than collapse. The mid-year contraction does not indicate systemic failure, but reflects an industry adjusting production, purchasing, and inventory in response to changing demand and supply conditions.


,


a figure that carried residual optimism from the previous year’s relative stability. However, by Q3, the market had contracted to $361 billion2


, illustrating how lingering


inventory adjustments, cautious end-user demand, and selective supply chain constraints continued to shape market performance. By Q4, the market had recovered modestly to $373 billion3


, signalling that the volatility of


earlier quarters may be giving way to a more predictable period moving forward.


18 December/January 2026


The easing of fluctuations over the year, along with cautious restocking in Q4, suggests the market may be settling into a steadier state, though the future will depend on how these trends continue to develop. While the global market paints a picture of gradual stabilisation, a closer look at European manufacturing metrics and component-level trends reveals more nuanced dynamics.


Beneath the headline numbers The Eurozone Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) provides a detailed view of industrial sentiment by tracking production levels, new orders, employment, supplier deliveries, and business expectations. Q1 opened at 45.14


the Eurozone Manufacturing PMI dropped to 49.6, showing the lowest reading in five months and compared to 50 in October5


.


The data indicated renewed demand-side weakness, with intensified factory job losses and faster inventory depletion, even as production continued to rise slowly and business confidence picked up.


, reflecting contraction,


but the index has generally risen through the year to just below 50. Although in November,


Components in Electronics


However, overall, 2025’s slow but steady improvement reflects cautious confidence among manufacturers, who adjusted production schedules and inventory policies in response to soft demand and cost pressures. Mid-sized economies such as the Netherlands and Spain showed modest expansion, while larger markets like Germany and France continued to lag, highlighting the uneven nature of recovery across the region. At the component level, divergences became increasingly apparent. Standard analogue component lead times remained stable at 16+ weeks throughout 2025, illustrating that supply chains for these essential products had normalised despite broader market fluctuations. In contrast, memory pricing, both


NAND and DRAM, shifted from stable in Q1 to increasing through Q4, reflecting renewed demand from high-performance computing (HPC) and AI applications, while supply conditions struggled to keep pace. Meanwhile, SRAM lead times expanded from 2 to 8 weeks in the first half of the year to 16+ weeks by Q46


, signalling a developing


shortage in a category that had previously been abundant.


Taken together, these data points show that beneath headline market stability, pressure points were emerging in specific product families, while European manufacturing gradually adjusted to shifting demand conditions. The combination of resilient analogue supplies, rising memory costs, and specific shortages like memory solutions underscores the importance of granular market intelligence, as trends can differ between product families and even between individual components.


Signals from Q4 and the 2026 outlook


In Q4, and in a stabilising market, the most www.cieonline.co.uk


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