478 Early Trading and....
Chips gain with gadget growth
a few excepts from CBS's MarketWatch
By Cecily Fraser and Janet Haney,
Chips gain with gadget growth
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- In the chipmaking industry, the personal computer's dominance could lose ground in the coming year amid the craze for mobile communication gadgets and Internet toys.
Chip sales are expected to take a healthy jump in 2000, but it won't be the maturing PC market that drives the growth. Cell phones, hand-held wireless devices and other information appliances will keep the chip industry moving. And the need for speed will still rule as consumers look for processors that can handle the Net's growing multimedia content.
"The investment opportunities in this business for the next 10 years are not going to be driven by PCs, [but by] information appliances, consumer electronics, communications," said Merrill Lynch semiconductor analyst Joe Osha.
Doug Andrey, director of information systems and finance at the Semiconductor Industry Association, echoed this view.
"The main drivers -- PCs are still the most important market, but they are going to decline in relative importance -- and the most important applications will be wireless communications, cellular phones and the like infrastructure."
Forecasts from the SIA call for a 21 percent increase in chip sales -- used in anything from PCs to wireless communications -- to reach $174 billion in 2000.
There are going to be a lot of devices like the Palm Pilot . . . that are going to become more intelligent over time," he said. "Some devices are going to be used for data creation, and some devices are going to be used for data consumption. |
