The semiconductor equipment market grew 37.3% in 2017 on the heels of capex spend by memory companies in order to increase bit capacity and move to more sophisticated products with smaller nanometer dimensions. Unfortunately these companies overspent resulting in excessive oversupply of memory chips. As memory prices started… Read More
Micron Buries the Hatchet with China
Micron has a very long history of counter cyclical investing, buying the assets of vanquished competitors when the memory industry is at the bottom of the cycle, such as it is right now.
Over the weekend, Micron announced that it had an agreement to acquire the assets of the now stalled Jinhua memory… 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
TSMC reported an in line quarter, as expected and also reported down Q1 guidance, also as expected. The only thing some investors may have been caught off guard about is the magnitude of the expected drop, 14%, from $9.4B to $7.35B. This is the largest quarter over quarter drop for TSMC in a very long time. Importantly for TSMC, 7NM … 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:
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
Applied Materials reported a just “in line” quarter but guidance was well below street expectation. AMAT reported EPS of $0.97 and revenues of $4.01B versus street of $0.97 and $4B. Guidance missed the mark by a wide margin with revs of $3.56 to $3.86 and EPS of $0.75 to $0.83 versus already reduced street expectations… Read More
Semiconductor stocks have had another significant down leg as the bad news continues to pile on. Bad news in this case doesn’t come in threes , it comes in droves. TI is perhaps very scary news as it is a rather broad based supplier of semiconductors that has fared better than more pure play chip suppliers. TI gave weak guidance… 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
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
