John, on the subject of where are the chips going if Intel is sold out and Dell is a little soft right now, a snippet from LSI Logic's conference call this week, as reported from Jock Hutchinson might help (from the LSI thread, Wilf Corrigan, CEO speaking):
"For the first time in years, US, Europe, and Asia are growing at the same time. Japan is growing but it is still a laggard. Thus, all of the major semiconductor
economies on the demand side are growing. Looking at Q4 as a culmination of the whole year showed a
year of controlled rapid growth."
Here's another one I like from Corrigan: "LSI has ample capacity in what will be a capacity
short semiconductor world in 2000."
Intel is doing expansions to get there, we've been reading about. Of course, Intel needs somewhere around 10X the capacity of LSI, as a total WAG.
I think the chips are going everywhere and Osha or whoever shouldn't worry about any one company, even if it is Dell.
Here's another piece of Jock's report where LSI talks about their hottest markets going forward, networks, broadband and wireless, which are of course also Intel's expansion areas. Not that I relish two companies I have stock in fighting it out, but I think there is enough business in those areas for more than one or two good companies.
Communications and Internet will be the drivers of industry and LSI for years to come. Communications products were 39% for the year. LSI expects communications to grow by 60% this year and be the majority of LSI's business going into 2001. The three drivers of the communications industry are the Internet, cell phones, and convergence of voice, video, and data across expanding backbone networks. This creates a new generation of infrastructure builders and transformation of traditional telephone equipment companies. Thus, it's not just companies like Cisco that are spending money. LSI is seeing a rebuilding of the whole communications infrastructure of developed nations and also rapidly deploying new capacity, especially in China and rest of Asia. The demand for bandwidth is growing exponentially as data and soon video are placing huge incremental demands on existing communications networks. Cell phone usage is skyrocketing, thus placing more demand for communications structure. Fortunately, optical networking has arrived. The other two business (groups) is networking computing, which is 34% of LSI's revenues and storage area networking, which is 13% of revenues. These two areas (groups) will show growth in 35% range for '00.
If you're interested in the rest of Jock's description of LSI's blowout quarter:
Message 12694467
Tony |
