Could things be about to get better? The Philadelphia SOX is going up - not by much but it's up 2.45 per cent this year. TSMC, a harbinger of industry trends, has increased its revenue forecast citing Chinese ordering. Intel, Adobe, Sun, Cisco, Google, Apple, HP and Applied - the elite of tech - saw significant share price gains last week.
Back in December there was talk of a semiconductor rally round about Feb/March
Last week TI decided to come up with a more precise forecast for Q109 than it had previously issued. In January many companies weren't making any forecast, let alone precise ones.
Earlier this month, Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale, told me: "We'll be down about 15 per cent this quarter. We're seeing modest signs of stabilisation in individual market areas. I feel better about where we are than I did 90 days ago."
There is talk that more PCs and more mobile phones are being built than was expected.
On the other hand, there is talk that premium high-tech shares are being bought simply because they're cheap.
It is reported that order push-outs are not prevalent and that inventories are tight, meaning any upturn in end-product demand will feed quickly through to chip orders.
"When the semiconductor recovery comes it will come quickly", Europe's leading semiconductor analyst, Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, "and the recovery will be steep."
Hi David,
Being a Brit working in the US for a Chinese company I feel I have a good global view of the industry today.
It's certainly good to see someone talking up the market rather then the usual scare stories I see which proliferate the down turn BUT....
I would have to say 20% to 25% downturn across the Industry is the norm I have seen this year.
I work with all the top 10 CM's and their inventory levels are growing as the OEM's are pushing out builds.
The factory shutdown rate in China hasn't slowed yet, at least not in the major Industrial zones and the supply base is shrinking as suppliers hit the wall.
The overall market situation is difficult to forecast as OEM's are passing the pain to the CM's who pass it on to the component suppliers and this all takes time to feed-thru.
When I see an upturn or less bad news than I expected from the OEM's I take a look at the CM's results to see if they were the ones who got burned or if it's a real market up tick.
In todays market the PCB industry is (in my opinion) a better indicator than the chip vendors and I don't see any sunshine in the PCB industry yet.
There is light at the end of the tunnel....but it just might be an oncoimg train!
Hope that's cheered you up.
Thanks Monty, that's on-the-ground information which is a much better guide than the SOX and the analysts. I'm off to cry into a pint.