Mannerisms

Had it not been for lower than expected prices, the semiconductor industry would have grown 20 per cent this year, says Future Horizons. As it is, the market looks to have grown ten per cent.

This is the final entry on this site for 2006, a year in which WiMAX stuttered, UWB faltered, Near Field Communication struggled to establish itself, RFID established itself, WiFi strengthened strongly and extended its scope, cellular telephony garnered oodles of dosh but lacked direction as high-end phones failed to find market favour, AMD and Texas Instruments flourished, and Intel wilted.

ASIC design may come to end to an end at 45nm, killed by rising cost and lengthening time-to-market.

Analogue chips have been doing well, with companies like Linear Technology Corporation making 78 per cent margins, and the market's set to get better this year, but where will the designers come from?

A couple of floors below where Bill Gates was delivering his keynote to the 40th Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last night, newly married couples and tourists were being ferried around canals on gondolas.

Hearing a Bill Gates keynote for the first time is an experience, especially if it’s shared with 3,500 people.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) have produced a pack of playing cards on each of which was an interesting fact about CES.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) believes that consumers are turning into early, or at least earlier, adopters.

Michael Dell blamed the telecom industry, at CES, for holding up the development of the digital home and challenged the industry to accelerate the deployment of fibre to the home.

LEDs are the future of lighting. Or are they? One person who is banking that they will be is the CEO of NXP Semiconductors, Frans van Houten.

The most remarkable marketing guy is operating out of a shanty bar across the road from the famous Mullins Beach Bar (now called Mannie’s Suga Suga) which is
a kilometre or two south of Speightstown on the west coastal road of Barbados.

It’s January. April is a couple of months away. Skies are grey. But 2007 is going to be a good year, according to IFS2007, a seminar run by analysts Future Horizons in London this week.

There was Bill Gates on the telly on Wednesday morning telling the Sky News interviewer that Microsoft does what it can to make the price of its products uniform in the different countries in which it sells them across the world.

Why do companies confine themselves to the descendants of Hitler, Attila, Stalin Genghis and Mao for designing websites?

‘Delivering supply chain solutions’ was written on the side of the truck outside the office on Wednesday. What could be inside? Answer: It was a general delivery truck belonging to a carrier delivering all and sundry to all and sundry. Supply chain solutions indeed!

Is the industry consolidating or de-consolidating? Recently I had a discussion on the topic with John Daane, CEO of Altera.

Tremendous change is on the way in the high-tech industry which means that everything is continuing as normal, it was said at the opening of the Future Horizons IEF 2007 meeting which started at 8:30 this morning at a hotel on a beach south of Athens.

A cracking good first day for the IEF 2007. The sun shone. The hotel was right on the beach. You could get sand under your toes in the coffee breaks.

Is the industry consolidating or de-consolidating? Recently I had a discussion on the topic with John Daane, CEO of Altera.

Apple could perform a notable double whammy this month by saving both the smartphone market and the solid state laptop market.

Is Wintel withering? First Dell, then Toshiba, erstwhile staunch Intel-ites, let in the alien hordes of AMD, then Dell goes back to selling PCs with an old OS after Microsoft Vista bombs.

Girlish hysterics which have seen analysts slash their forecast for the year, now turn out to have been just that, hysterics caused by false assumptions based on one quarter's figures

SEMI, the equipment people, have come up with encouraging industry news - that device manufacturers will only increase their capital spending on equipment by three per cent and their spending on fab construction by between four to five per cent this year.

Being a high-tech CEO, and being certain about anything, appear to be incompatible these days.

Unexpected mega-shifts are appearing in the industry which signalling a rearrangement in the balance of power in various markets.

Lawksa-mercy what a laugh, the rebounding price of memory might get all those semiconductor industry analysts having to put their forecasts up again.

The difficulties of forecasting the semiconductor industry have prompted analysts Future Horizons to resort to the application of chaos theory.

It’s been a pretty miserable Q2 for the chip sector. Although the semiconductor industry’s overall revenues declined sequentially by only 1 per cent in Q2 (after a 6 per cent decline in Q1), many companies have found profits elusive.

So here we are, two months into the second half of the year when things should get better. Poor results in the first half are traditionally spiced with the prediction that things will turn up in the second. As STMicroelectronics’ chief economist, Jean-Philippe Dauvin says: “I wish I could always live in the second half of the year.”

The Sharp-Pioneer tie-up, announced yesterday, and the purchase of Sanyo Semiconductor reported today, reflect a growing trend in Japan to look for amalgamations and restructurings in the technology industry. Another such deal, expected soon, is the merger of Sony Semiconductor with Toshiba.

It’s an interesting commentary on human nature to see the mix of affection and wariness in the attitude of Japan to Commodore Matthew Perry who sailed with four ships into Tokyo Bay on March 31st 1854 to the astonishment of the locals who had never seen steamships before.

Fresh from success in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), IBM is to spread its wings, and its market development dollars, across a new range of geographies: Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, Vietnam, the Philippines, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Chile and Peru, according to an internal IBM memo quoted in the New York Times.

Freescale and Texas Instruments have been hit by cellphone woes, with TI facing a 3.4 per cent decline in revenues and said to be laying off 400 people in Dallas, and Freescale said to be facing a 10.7 per cent decline in 2007 chip sales primarily because of the weakness in the cellphone business of its main customer, Motorola.

The news from CES 2008 that Intel is to try its hand again at mobile telecoms and consumer chips leads one to ask the question: Can Intel succeed in markets where it doesn’t have a monopoly?

According to semiconductor industry folk-lore this should be a very good year for the chip industry.

Are Americans more gullible than the rest of the world? It seems that all the rumours that AMD and IBM will merge have come out of the US, while those who think the idea daft are non-Americans.

Someone calling himself Paul Otellini has responded somewhat unfavourably to a report carried by Barron’s that Goldman Sachs has taken Intel off its ‘Conviction Buy List’.

It must be hellish being a CEO these days. You can’t swan around bathed in glory when you’ve got stock market analysts snapping at your heels telling you they won’t recommend people to buy your shares unless you do what they say.

For Intel, another day means another diversification. Even as it tries, reportedly, to sell to Seagate its share in its last diversification -  the NAND jv with Micron - Intel is diversifying into new areas: application specific microcontrollers, graphics processors, Wimax,  and, of course, Atom.

The semiconductor industry always surprises. Now, when gloomsters from economists to politicians to bankers to retailers to manufacturers and pundits are predicting a bleak economic year, the semiconductor industry is booming.

One of the interesting things about this financial downturn is that no one really has a clue what's going to happen.

"If the global recession ends before 2010, bombed out semi stocks are a great bargain", wrote the Financial Times yesterday. 

The solar power industry will go as potty as the memory industry next year with massive over-supply causing dramatic falls in pricing. While sales of solar panels will increase nearly 10 per, revenues from sales of solar panels will fall by 20 per cent.

Will Intel have to change its business model to compete in the netbook market? After all Intel likes fat margins on its CPUs, while netbook CPUs are going to be low-margin, and Intel builds its fabs for high performance, while netbook CPUs require low-power CPUs - or they will when ARM-based netbook CPUs hit the market later this year.

Has Intel scored the most spectacular own goal with its Atom microprocessor? After all, Intel and Microsoft did an amazing job in keeping PC prices high for about 25 years when Moore's Law said the prices should have halved every eighteen months.

Crikey Moses. The chip market fell 22.5 per cent in Q4, could fall another 20 per cent in Q1, and may be 28 per cent down in 2009, according to Future Horizons at the company's International Forecast Seminar 2009 (IFS2009) in London yesterday.

Don't worry about recession in the semiconductor industry, it won't be lasting all year. That was the message from semiconductor industry analyst Bill McClean of IC Insights to the recent ISS meeting arranged by SEMI the trade body for semiconductor production equipment and materials suppliers.

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.

It's off to the races, guys. The S&P 500 had its biggest rise in 60 years over the last ten days - up 22 per cent. The Japanese Nikkei is up 20 per cent from its March 10th, 20 year low. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index is up 21 per cent since March 9. The Philadelphia SOX has gone from 188 to 234 in a couple of weeks.

When the CEOs of major constituents of the chip business publicly announce their expectation of recovery, the chances are that  the horrendous slump in demand in Q4 08 and Q109 took the industry to the bottom in one sharp jolt, and that the trend is now upwards and to the right.

To take a pay freeze when you're earning $12m a year like the boss of Intel, or $5m a year if you're a senior Intel exec, might seem like a meaningful gesture, but the directors of Japan's Sharp Electronics are said have agreed to a pay cut of up to 50 per cent.

It looks as if the semiconductor sector will lead the world out of  recession. Since mid-March, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) has risen from 190 to over 270.

An idea for getting the IPO market up and running again has been proposed by Todd Dagres, founder and general partner in the US investment company Spark Capital.

It was surreal listening to Intel defend itself against the EC's fine last week. The two sides were just miles apart. It was a sort of 'Yes you did; No I didn't' type of ding-dong. 

When China's OEMs, ODMs, and contract manufacturers start seeing a manufacturing  upturn, the whole world can breathe a sigh of relief that the economic worst is over.

 SMIC, the Shanghai foundry company, is now saying that orders from Chinese end product manufacturers are picking up fast.

Financial people are funny. Publicly, on the telly, they make their trade sound serious and statistics-based but, once let loose on the trading floor, it's the smell of blood, the collective adrenalin surge of the pack, that seem to fuel their decisions. Last week the US IPO market came roaring back.

The rate of increase in American unemployment reduced in May, after increasing for the previous 16 months, and that's a signal that the economic recovery is under way, according to the OECD, while the ONS and NIESR see the UK economy beginning to grow again.

Could the banking bail-out be an 'inspired trade' which will lead to a profit for the governments which re-capitalised the failing bankers? Well, Yes, according to chief international economist at ING, Rob Carnell.

The electronics industry is worth €1.14 trillion, compared to the car industry's €1.8 trillion. Half of the industry's production comes from Asia, and half of the industry is in the data processing and telecommunications sectors.

To start two posts in a week with 'Good Old EU' is totally unexpected. On Tuesday it was the EU's action in standardising mobile phone chargers, now it's bringing down the cost of phone calls and texting while abroad.

Is end demand for semiconductors beginning to grow? Some analysts seem to think that Q3 could see a return to growth in real end-user demand.