Gottfried, >How many months before an expected SEMI orders top do the stocks begin to sell off?
I saw Scott McNeally interviewed on NBR tonight. He explained how the Internet infrastructure buildout was really just beginning, saying we were just in the top of the first inning, as they're all quoting baseball as an analogy nowadays. Some drivers he mentioned were the big companies rushing to get to the web to conduct their businesses with on line sales; ecommerce just beginning; voice over IP, where some estimate 1/2 of all voice traffic being on the net by 2005; entertainment: music and movies (huge files), many other applications. This is not to mention simple email and Internet browsing, which is not available yet among the vast majority of the people in the world. All of these applications will result in chips, chips and more chips. But we've heard all this before. What blows me away is how Sun continues to clean up in the web serving market when their servers are 3 or 4 times worse in terms of price/performance than Intel servers, for example. But Intel servers also grew by 40% YOY at Compaq (revenues). Every company that does it right is cleaning up with Internet infrastructure equipment. Even Sun with 5 year old equipment (they do a helluva lot of other things right, however). I'm beginning to think that semiconductors may not have a significant problem wrt supply-demand, the old bugaboo, until the Internet is built out (and when would that be). But we've heard that before too.
For now, I'm looking forward to Cisco putting a stop to the tech slide with blowout and a half earnings on August 8th, after the market. They're the most Internet-centric big company there is, and they have mostly all the right products, and they aren't way out of whack price/performance-wise. Seeing what Sun did, imagine what Cisco could do. Just had a horrible thought: what if Cisco announces problems with getting enough semiconductors!
Tony |
