I think this was the reason for the price spike yesterday...
SAN FRANCISCO -- Cypress (CY:NYSE - news) CEO T.J. Rodgers figures the chip cycle won't start heading downhill until a far-off 2004. Feel free to shield the sun from your eyes and squint off into the distance.
Rodgers predicts so much road between now and the coming chip downturn, not because of pragmatism among chipmakers to keep them from the inevitable glut of supply that curses the industry when it oversteps demand, but because of dumb bad luck. "Equipment makers can't keep up. ... Which basically keeps us from killing ourselves again," he said at the Banc of America Securities Investment Conference here Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Rodgers slipped into a hair shirt and flagellated himself for the B of A crowd, to prove himself the penitent man. But more than that, he wanted to move on from Cypress' 1998-99 dip. "Last year, we were not growing, and I fessed up to it," the straight-shooting Cypress CEO said.
Rodgers professed his past guilt in order to absolve his company of future doubts. Once Cypress left the sinful land of lagging growth, Rodgers insisted, it began to double the industry's growth rate in the recovery from the down cycle. Not only that, but it also began to move away from the base pursuit of commodity RAM production to climb on hands and knees toward the higher ideals of chips, for more challenging applications such as telecommunications, data communications, video and voice. Standing stone-faced at the lectern, he said, "Cypress is not, I repeat, not, I repeat, not a static RAM story."
Say it again, brother T.J.! |
