With the general cooling of the macro economy and the slow growth of the consumer electronics industry, a domino effect has formed, and various industries such as mobile phones, PCs, memory, and automobiles have fallen into business crises to varying degrees...

Sales in the global semiconductor industry have generally declined, and recent news that ON Semiconductor is preparing to implement a layoff plan at its large chip factory in Gresham, USA.

ON Semiconductor rumored to be laying off staff

A foreign media oregonlive report pointed out that ON Semiconductor is preparing to lay off workers at its large chip factory in Gresham, the United States. The specific layoff scale has not been announced. ON Semiconductor is headquartered in Arizona, USA, and one of its largest and most advanced chip factory facilities is in Gresham.

As slowing markets and weak macroeconomic conditions weigh on the company's near-term growth prospects, ON Semiconductor is taking steps across the organization to rein in expenses, including reducing employees, sources said.

While ON Semiconductor did not disclose how many people lost their jobs, employees said the cuts were steeper at its Gresham plant in the United States, where 750 workers have been cut over the past few years.

At present, ON Semiconductor has not responded to the layoff, and the authenticity of this source remains to be further verified.

In fact, layoffs are already in the works. In February this year, ON Semiconductor released its 2018 Q4 performance report. The data showed that the total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018 was US$1,503.1 million, an increase of about 9% from the same quarter last year. Revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018 was down approximately 3% from the third quarter of 2018.

Despite slowing macroeconomic conditions, ON Semiconductor delivered strong results in the fourth quarter. ON Semiconductor said that the key long-term trends that will continue to drive the growth of electronic components in the automotive, industrial and cloud computing end markets remain unchanged, and it remains optimistic about the medium and long-term prospects of the market. However, ON Semiconductor also stated that it will continue to provide solid profit margins and available cash flow in the future, and the company will prudently manage related businesses to adjust to the changing demand environment.

The chip industry may not escape a cyclical recession

The economic cycle includes four stages: boom, recession, depression, and recovery. Nowadays, the market is generally faced with problems such as low consumer demand, declining investment willingness, saturated production capacity, and sharp decline in corporate profits. Obviously, the global economy has passed the prosperous stage and is now heading for recession.

From communication equipment to PC, automobile, industry, medical and other fields, semiconductor applications have always carried people's daily social travel, which can be said to be ubiquitous in people's lives. The global economic slowdown has affected even ON Semiconductor.

Many people are not unfamiliar with Anson. Separated from Motorola in 1999, ON Semiconductor provides solutions for energy-efficient power management, analog, sensor, logic, timing, interconnect, discrete, SoC and custom devices. Since the successful acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor with US$2.4 billion in cash in 2016, ON Semiconductor has become the world's second largest supplier of power semiconductors.

But such brilliant achievements have not allowed ON Semiconductor to escape the cyclical recession of the chip industry. It is reported that ON Semiconductor forecasts sales of nearly 1.4 billion US dollars this quarter, a slight decline compared with the same period last year.

The global economy is slowing, and the chip industry is experiencing a cyclical recession. According to the latest data released by SIA this month, the global semiconductor market sales in January 2019 decreased by 5.7% compared with January 2017 to $35.5 billion, marking the first negative growth in 30 months since July 2016.