What’s next for semiconductor profits and value creation?
Semiconductor profits have been strong over the past few years.
Could recent changes within the industry stall their progress?
半导体行业未来如何创造利润和价值
半导体利润在过去几年一直很强劲。行业内最近的变化会阻碍整个行业进一步创造新的价值和利润吗？

Outside Silicon Valley, the semiconductor industry’s recent profitability seems unsurprising. The general assumption is that these players, like other tech companies, have long benefited from the rise of PCs, smartphones, and other devices. But insiders know that the industry’s good fortune is a relatively recent phenomenon. While software players were achieving record gains for most of the past two decades, most semiconductor companies achieved limited economic profitability. Overall, only microprocessor companies and some fabless players could count on consistently strong returns, above the cost of capital.
Now the semiconductor sector is showing strong and rising profits. What’s more, companies in virtually all subsegments are winning big. To discover how semiconductor companies engineered this turnaround, we analyzed trends related to economic profit (see sidebar, “Economic profit”). With this information, we wanted to answer an even more important question: What can semiconductor players do to ensure that the recent gains are not a blipbut the emergence of a new industry norm?