The worldwide semiconductor industry has admitted that it is in trouble.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reported has said that worldwide semiconductor sales fell to 20.8 billion US dollars in November, a decline of 9.8 percent compared with the same month last year.

This means that global sales of semiconductors were 7.2 percent lower in November than the 22.4 billion US dollars in October 2008. To make matters worse the figures don't include memory chips, which have been suffering from a supply glut -- $17.3 billion US dollars, but this is down from  18.2 billion US dollars just a month before.

Sales for the first 11 months of 2008 were 232.7 billion US dollars, the SIA said, an increase of 0.2 percent from the first 11 months of 2007. Excluding memory products, year-to-date industry sales increased 5.6 percent, SIA said.