Get long Semi's - The Sox is going to 1200 again per Kurlak. Wheeeeee, nothing like a new mania.........
----------------------------------
UPDATE 3-World chip sales up 3 pct Sept
Friday November 1, 4:54 pm ET
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Global semiconductor sales rose by a slightly
less-than-expected 3 percent to $12.3 billion in September from August, according to
figures published on Friday from an industry group, as chipmakers braced for a
potentially sluggish fourth quarter.
The September sales numbers,
released by the World
Semiconductor Trade Statistics
(WSTS) group, showed revenues
rose 21 percent from the same
month a year earlier.
The $139 billion-a-year industry
usually sees a holiday rally toward
the end of the year as electronics
makers stock up on the
semiconductors that make their
computers, phones and toys work.
But many executives and analysts
already expect this holiday-selling
season to be muted.
"My gut feeling is that the third and
fourth quarter is going to be a little flatter than we'd see from typical seasonality," said
Eric Ross, semiconductor analyst for investment bank Investec.
Chipmakers such as Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - News) and Texas Instruments Inc.
(NYSE:TXN - News) warned investors last month that they expected the traditional
fourth-quarter upturn to be very limited and pricing pressure to be severe.
"Our forecast for all of 2002 continues to stand at flat (year over year), and we see little
in the September numbers that might cause us to change our mind," Joe Osha, an
analyst at Merrill Lynch, wrote in a note to clients in which he cited similar figures
released by the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group based in San Jose,
California.
September's month-on-month growth was slightly faster than in the traditional slow
summer month of August, when sales rose 2.1 percent.
RECOVERY ADDED 'BREADTH AND STRENGTH'
"The recovery of the semiconductor industry has picked up breadth and strength as
the year has progressed," said SIA President George Scalise in a statement.
The sequential third-quarter growth follows 5.8 percent sequential growth in the
second-quarter 5.6 percent growth in the year's second quarter, with momentum
across major product sectors, including wireless, digital consumer products, PCs and
automotive, Scalise said.
Sales of flash memory chips, digital signal processors, or DSP chips, and wireless
application-specific standard products all rose by double digits in the third quarter, the
SIA said.
Chips used in such popular consumer products as video games, DVDs, and digital
cameras also rose in the quarter, including 21 percent growth in standard cell-chips
and a 15 percent increase in optoelectronics-related chips.
September chip sales came in about $250 million below the estimates suggested by
WSTS's own third-quarter forecast, industry sources said.
Europe performed better than expected, the U.S. worse than forecast, and Asia slightly
slower but still strong.
Industry sources said controllers, used in many automotive applications such as
airbags and brake controllers, were doing well. This could help explain European
outperformance, because chip makers such as Franco-Italian STMicroelectronics and
Germany's Infineon Technologies AG (XETRA:IFXGn.DE - News) are big players in car
chips.
But demand for other key semiconductor products such as computers and cellphones
grew slowly on the back of an uncertain economic outlook.
September chip sales, measured as a three-month average to eliminate short-term
swings, grew 4.6 percent to $2.3 billion in Europe compared with August. Revenues in
the Americas grew two percent to $2.6 billion, and in Asia Pacific 3.1 percent to $4.5
billion. Sales in Japan were up 2.7 percent at $2.8 billion
Compared with a year earlier, September sales grew 10.6 percent in Europe, 8.0
percent in the Americas and 39.1 percent in Asia Pacific. Japan grew 17.3 percent.
(Additional reporting by Daniel Sorid in New York and Duncan Martell in San
Francisco.)
biz.yahoo.com |
