Luckily cumulative shipments never decline, and
sometimes half a fiscal year can include nine months??
Ilmarinen
P.S. I remember one chip company who shipped a lot, or
at least put them in boxes, and then it turned out
the boxes were mostly still in the cellar waiting
for FedEx, contracts had issues of how and when and if
payments were actually made, and then it was disaster,
class action auction. (these guys missed a product
generation, standard and couldn't even sell the old
cycle stuff for free, like some major GSM vendors at 30%
loss, but almost made it through that quarterly report)
P.P.S That is why I am so happy that Nokia handsets
are more and more field and wireless upgradable, if in
a really tough situation one could box and ship and
upgrade the firmware the next quarter, maybe even the
540 Motorola GPRS handsets which has been imported
to FInland.
(but these guys on top of all above got caught in
generational processing shift, from the already shrunk to
the totally new one, all five trains had already left, all
tickets and layouts became worthless, even timeschedules
changed overnight, in the middle of the shareholder value dark)
P.P.P.S. Luckily Nokia went through something similar in
1995-6, I hope they still have some of those middle
managers left who cannot forget it??
(but I'm happy with TI's 0.3meter pizza wafers)
Obviously above cellar experience have little to do with
neither QCOM nor Nokia, and only Intel can sell some
for $4,000 in the first quarter, then get down to $100 with
a new shrunk process, because all those pins are still
expensive. |
