Atmel flash booked through year end
By Ismini Scouras
Electronic Buyers' News
(07/28/99, 03:31:41 PM EDT)
SAN FRANCISCO — A rise in demand from cellular phone and set-top box customers has cleared Atmel Corp.'s shelves of flash chips, according to B. Jeffrey Katz, the company's vice president of marketing. "We're booked out in flash through the year," Katz said, speaking here Wednesday (July 28) at the BancBoston Robertson Stephens Semiconductor Conference.
And a tighter supply and demand balance is pushing flash prices upward, Katz said. The price of a 16-Mbit flash part, for example, has risen from between $3 and $4 at the beginning of the year to nearly $5.50. "It has been increasingly up, but not sudden," Katz said. "It started at the end of the first quarter and continued through the second quarter.
"All of our products have been showing better pricing than six months ago," Katz said.
Despite the company's shortage of flash chips, Atmel (San Jose, Calif.) said that it won't need to build a fabrication facility until 2002. In fact, the company's 1999 capital spending budget — pegged at $180 million — will be down from last year. In 2000, Atmel's capital expenditures will total approximately $200 million, Katz said.
Whether the company will spend on additional acquisitions depends on which companies are in play, Katz said.
In January, Atmel acquired the Smart Information Transfer (SIT) business of Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector, a move that enabled it to enter the smart-card IC business. A year ago, Atmel bought Data Communications Technologies (DCT), of Research Triangle Park, N.C.
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