The government met with trade associations to discuss ways to revitalize the domestic system semiconductor sector that currently holds a mere three percent of the global market.

In a meeting held by the industry ministry on Thursday, the Korea International Trade Association(KITA) and the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency(KOTRA) shared the current status and prospects of the country's semiconductor exports.

KITA noted that although South Korea is the global number one in memory chips, it only accounts for three percent of the global system semiconductor market, which is 60 percent of the total semiconductor industry.

The association also raised concerns that chip exports plunged 44-point-five percent in January  and 42-point-five percent in February from a year earlier amid a sharp drop in chip prices due to a decrease in demand and an accumulation of inventory.

However, the trade association predicted that the industry is likely to recover in the second half of this year due to an increase in demand for DDR5 amid an expansion of new central processing units and an increase in demand for high-capacity and high-performance products in the growing artificial intelligence (AI) market.

The industry ministry, for its part, emphasized a revamp of the system semiconductor sector amid a global trend in focusing on each specialty of the system semiconductor value chain with the advances in products and technologies.