LONDON — The Americas region achieved actual sales of $3.12 billion in July 2009, up 7.3 percent from the same month a year before, according to to "actual" data from the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization.

The Americas region, which is dominated in terms of sales by the U.S., is the first region to demonstrate year-on-year growth since Asia-Pacific in September 2008.

In contrast all the other regional markets monitored by WSTS are still falling year-on-year and the global market fell in July by 9.1 percent.

The worst performing region is Europe, which with July sales of $2.38 billion was a market still 23.0 percent behind where it was in July 2008. Japan scored July sales of $3.46 billion and was 18.3 percent down on the $4.23 billion recorded in July 2008. The Asia-Pacific region, which is worth approximately half the global market for semiconductor chips achieved sales data of $9.94 billion in July 2009, down 9.4 percent on the same month a year before.

The SIA publishes WSTS numbers as a three-month average. It argues that this smoothes out the data which would otherwise display the effect of in-quarter reporting that tend to treat March, June, September and December as five-week months. However, it is still possible to compare actual sales year-on-year and avoid such problems.