اثر نوآوری های فنی بر ارزش بازار صنعت نیمه هادی آمریکا

This article discusses the effects of technical innovation on the market value (MV) of the American semiconductor industry from the perspective of investors in the securities market. The study quantifies the technical innovations of the semiconductor industry and uses the proportional change of Average Process Technology (APT) as a proxy variable to measure the industrial capability of technical innovations and to act as one of the explanatory variables of a regression model for discussing the connection between technical innovation and MV. The results indicate that: 1) the degree of technical innovation and the proportional change in productivity of the semiconductor industry are the major factors that affect proportional change in the MV of the U.S. semiconductor industry; 2) regardless of the size of a company's MV or the companies' classification in terms of products and services (the Equipment & Material Sector, the Board Line Sector, the IC & Chip Sector and the Fabless & Specialist Sector), the degree of technical innovation shows a significant positive effect on MV.

The semiconductor industry originated in the U.S. in the 1960s and was dominated by the U.S. until the beginning of the 1980s, when the Japanese semiconductor industry emerged to compete with the U.S. firms (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). From 1986 to 2000, the U.S. and Japanese Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDM) dominated the four major fields of global semiconductor applications: computers, communication, consumption and other fields. When the internet and communication revolution occurred in the mid-1990s, the field of semiconductor applications expanded. The late-industrialization nations–Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and China–began to challenge the high-tech industry of the advanced countries [1], which caused the manufacturing of global semiconductor products to shift to Asian emerging nations. At the end of the 1990s, China and India emerged as competitors in the industry, and their emergence speeded up the eastward industrial transfer. In 2002, the semiconductor sales of Asian emerging nations exceeded those of the U.S., making those nations the largest suppliers in the world.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, technical innovations in the semiconductor industry have affected both the supply side (through increased production and decreased cost) and the demand side. Capability in technical innovation has become an important variable in valuing the performance of semiconductor firms. The existing studies on the semiconductor industry have often discussed the content and procedure of innovative activities and have described the performance of innovation qualitatively. However, this study processes the technical innovations of the semiconductor industry quantitatively using the proportional change of APT as a proxy variable to measure the technical innovation capabilities of the industry that act as explanatory variables of the regression model. The study also discusses the connection between technical innovation and MV.