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
For those who have been paying any attention to the semiconductor industry its no surprise that memory demand and therefore pricing is down from its peak earlier in the year. Its not getting better any time fast.
After several strong years of demand and pricing, which was followed by enormous CAPEX spending we are seeing the standard… Read More
At the recent trade talks in South America, the US and China both kicked the can down the road as neither one were obviously willing to do a deal nor had done any background work to get a deal done. Instead we have a bunch of empty promises and vague and conflicting descriptions of what was not really even agreed to.
Essentially worthless… 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
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
