Q2 sales to Conexant were 47% of total sales.
That was down from 56% of total in Q1 (total overall, not total HBT).
47% of total sales was equivalent to 59% of HBT sales, by my calculations.
{that and below from Kopin responses in Q & A Session of Q2 Conference Call}
Mitsubishi also buys AlGaAs HBT wafers to make power amplifiers for handsets. They were the second largest HBT customer at more than 10% of HBT sales in Q2. Mitsubishi is manufacturing PAs primarily for GSM phones; as of early Q3, Conexant's mix had shifted from mostly CDMA to mostly GSM phones manufactured from Kopin product.
Next in share comes Nortel, which uses InGaP HBT wafers to make various high-speed IC components for their fiber optic networks. Fan said they are a "very big customer" but did not give a percentage. A second customer for InGaP wafers is Agilent, for manufacture of high-frequency testing circuits. InGaP was estimated at 25% of HBT sales for the quarter (not sure that jibes), with that percentage rising.
At that time (July 27), Fan anticipated sales to both Mitsubishi and Nortel would double over the next six months. Fan added that "we're also sampling 6-inch InGaP with many new customers and they should be going into production soon." He later mentioned that the new customers are almost universally looking at InGaP rather than AlGaAs.
The percentage of HBT sales for fiber optic applications was about 15%.
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Comments:
Based on September quarter results reported so far in their respective industries, it might be reasonable to revise anticipated growth rates to lower growth at Mitsubishi, higher at Nortel, but I'll assume combined growth is still about the same.
In fiber optics, Conexant probably makes up most of the difference between the total and Nortel's share; in the press release about the new Optical Communications Products Group, these are the two names that are named. If Nortel is at about 10%, Conexant's 59% is then divided roughly as 54 for handset ("CNXT-h") and 5 for fiber optic end markets. In their recent announcement about the spin-off, Conexant said that their Internet infrastructure business has grown at 100% annually over the past two years.
Crunching all these numbers and going with the above assumptions for Nortel and Mitsubishi: 20% of HBT sales are growing at about 100% per six months, which combined with a midway estimate of 50% per six months for the remaining 26% not going to CNXT-h, gives you a Q2-to-Q3 growth rate of about 31% for all HBT excluding CNXT-h. Under this scenario, if shipments for CNXT-h remain flat, it would still be possible to achieve about 14% growth in HBT sales for Q3. That's without any contribution from new InGaP customers.
From Conexant's earnings report this past Wednesday, this statement is encouraging wrt Q3, since the shipments from Kopin are swinging to GSM: While significant weakness continued in the code division multiple access (CDMA) market in Korea, the division grew revenues in global system for mobile communications (GSM) and time division multiple access (TDMA) power amplifiers and increased shipments of GSM system solutions. However, looking ahead, Decker spoke of general weakness: "We are entering the first quarter of fiscal 2001 with a clear market environment of weakening demand in digital cellular handsets..." So, I'm sure Fan will be grilled about this in Kopin's upcoming conference call. A mitigating factor is that CNXT-h will have continued to drop as a percentage of total HBT sales, probably to a little under 50% at the start of Q4.
WT |
