Last week I attended the 2019 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference. I gave two presentations, attended dozens of papers and conducted three interviews. I will be doing some detailed write ups particularly on EUV but I am waiting for the presentations from several of the papers. In the mean time I thought I would put some overall … Read More
Not as much new – No breakthrough announcements, 300 watts is better than 250 watts – Pellicle Problems, TSMC is EUV king – Third times a charm? We attended this years SPIE Lithography convention in San Jose as we have for many years. Although the show was quite enthusiastic and EUV was the central topic, as it has… Read More
ASML reported a more or less in line quarter as expected, coming in at EUR3.14B in revenues and EPS of EUR1.87. However, guidance was worse than most analysts were expecting with Q1 revenues expected to be EUR2.1B or down about one third.
This cut is something we have been talking about for a while as we have expected sharp memory CAPEX… Read More
We attended the Needham Growth Conference which is one of the first conferences of the year and in the quiet period before most companies reported so even though there was no “official” comment from most companies on the quarter, the surrounding commentary spoke volumes:
It should come as no big surprise that Samsung will miss its Q4 numbers. The company pre announced that profits will be 10.8T KWON (about $9.7B ) versus the 13.2T KWON analysts had predicted, close to a 20% miss. This number is also down about 39% sequentially. Revenue at 59T KWON instead of expected 62.8T KWON and down about 10%. The… Read More
On the first day of trading in the new year Apple just announced, after the close, that revenues will be lower than previously expected coming in at $84B versus the expected range of $89B to $93B and analyst estimates of the current quarter at $91.5B. Ugly….. The blame was laid squarely on China as slowing sales and trade tensions… Read More
Semiconductor equipment vendor ranking, which didn’t change much between 2016 and 2017, is undergoing a makeover, as Lam Research, ASML, and Tokyo Electron (TEL) are switching places and top-ranked Applied Materials is getting closer to losing its number one ranking.
Since the 1990s, Applied Materials has been the market leader… Read More
The DOJ last week released a previously sealed indictment against UMC, Jinhua and three individuals for stealing Micron trade secrets. The indictment is very damning of UMC with very specific semiconductor technology files that were stolen by UMC related people then passed on to Jinhua through its joint development with UMC.… Read More
ASML reported EUR2.78B in revenues with EUR2.08B in systems. 58% was for memory. EUV was EUR513M with 5 systems. Importantly orders were for EUR2.20B in systems at 64% memory and 5 EUV tools. This was likely better than expectations given the overall industry weakness. EPS of EUR1.60 was more or less in line with expectations. Guidance… Read More
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
