Over the past 50 years in our industry, there have been three invariant principles:
Given that the semiconductor industry is clearly in the midst of a down cycle (even though there are cycle deniers, also members of the flat earth society…), most investors and industry participants want to know the timing of the down cycle and the shape of the recovery as we want to know when its safe to buy the stocks again. … Read More
The amount of negative news and information about the semiconductor industry seems to be increasing at a faster rate. Micron put up a better quarter than expected but more importantly guided less than expected. We are surprised that the street is surprised as the decline in memory pricing is well known and Micron has been clear about… Read More
Last week saw a unique confluence of events that continue the negative news flow in semicap following the story about GloFo. At a financial conference, Micron’s CFO said NAND prices were declining, this was on top of an analyst note in the morning about the same issue. Even though this should be no surprise as memory has had … Read More
Could this be more bad news for semicap spend? Negative for US chip independence & AMD costs ? Rumors of Global Foundries dropping out of the 7NM race have been increasing rapidly. What could be a fatal blow to the GloFo 7NM program was AMD deciding to go with TSMC for 7NM first for one product and finally for its next generation CPUs.… Read More
Applied reported a more or less in line quarter, slightly beating weaker expectations. As we had projected, the October quarter is expected to have revenues down 10% which is at the low end of our expected 10-15% drop in business. Applied services helped partially make up for some of the equipment sales weakness. Revenue came in … Read More
Applied Materials (AMAT) is batting clean up in a quarter that has not been pretty. Lately semi stocks seem to have been hit by not only stock specific issues but continued and increasing memory concerns coupled with more macro issues. On top of all this, China trade issues which have in the meantime taken a back burner to other issues… Read More
KLAC put up a great quarter coming in at revenues of $1.07B and EPS of $2.22. Guidance is for $1.03B to $1.1B with EPS of $2 to $2.32. Both reported and guided were at the high end of the range and above consensus. We had suggested in our preview notes that KLAC would be the least impacted of the big three (AMAT, LRCX & KLAC) semi equipment… Read More
The stock market hates uncertainty most of all. In the absence of the known, the market will assume the worst or close to it. Right now there is a lot of uncertainty that continues to have more downside beta than upside beta. Everybody we spoke to at Semicon wakes up in the morning wondering what tweet was sent at 5AM that will impact their… Read More
We attended Semicon West Monday and Tuesday, the annual show for the semi equipment industry. Its very clear from discussions with all our sources in the industry that confirm that Samsung has put the brakes on spending on memory and that message was reinforced by declines in their expected profitability due to weaker memory pricing.… Read More
