Amazing how much milage they get out of this option horseshit
JP Morgan suggested the underperformance in the group may be due to fears of a demand decline or inventory buildup. Another negative that gets new legs on a daily basis is suspicious option grants. In the JP Morgan Tech Conference, the firm found more negatives than positives for the industry.
UPDATE 1-Samsung says chip business bottomed out early May
Thu May 25, 2006 9:59 PM ET
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SEOUL, May 26 (Reuters) - The semiconductor business of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (005930.KS: Quote, Profile, Research), the world's top maker of memory chips, hit bottom in early May and earnings should improve notably from the third quarter, a top executive said on Friday.
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UPDATE 1-Samsung says chip business bottomed out early May
Samsung says chip business bottomed out early May
LCD television sales rise 135 percent in Q1-survey
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Hwang Chang-gyu, president of the semiconductor business, also said NAND flash memory prices had stablised and forecast demand for the chips would grow steadily in the second half.
Hwang, whose comments tend to be particularly closely followed by the market, was speaking on the sidelines of the Seoul Digital Forum.
"Early May marked a bottom," Hwang said. "If things improve quickly, it could show in second-quarter earnings. Otherwise we'll see a clear improvement in the third quarter."
Hwang added that second-quarter earnings would come in "as expected," but declined to provide figures.
Samsung raised prices of NAND-type flash memory chips, used in digital cameras and music players, by a "mid-single-digit" percent earlier this month for the first time this year, after seeing chip prices tumble 25 percent in the first quarter.
When asked if Samsung had plans to raise NAND prices again in June, Hwang said: "What's more important is demand in growth," adding, that demand was improving with new applications with higher memory capacity emerging.
Booming demand for flash memory chips, used in products like Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPod, led Samsung to a 40 percent jump in profits in the fourth quarter. But NAND chip prices have slumped since January as extra supplies poured in while consumer demand cooled off.
Hwang also said demand for dynamic random access memory (DRAM), used in computer hard drives, had been stable, with notebook computers leading the growth in the personal computer market.
Hwang said it was a "matter of time" before flash memory-based hard drives overtook rotating hard disc drives.
Samsung on Tuesday said it would release the world's first PCs embedded with a 32-Gigabyte (GB) NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD) on the Korean market in early June.
Shares in Samsung, the country's biggest stock with a market value of $106.9 billion, were up 1.3 pct at 624,000 won at 0146 GMT by 0150 GMT, compared with a 2.18 percent rise in the main index. |
