Gangbusters!!!
Thanks to
- the deep discount by Intel on P55C (Pentium w/MMX),
- shoot-out in Q4 between Intel/AMD/CYRIX on PentiumII/K6/M2,
- price of low end PC continuing to be taken lower (150mHz Compaq w/MediaGX now, street availability of MediaGX now which allows VARs to offer ~$500 166mHz PCs), (incidently, I think the $500 PC will start to make a difference by Jan '98 overseas; new market generally takes 4 to 6 months to develop)
- probably affordable notebooks built with the lower priced processors, especially the MediaGX with really low power consumptions,
- educational software prices (from Edmark, Learning Smith etc.) finally becoming reasonbly priced at $20 this Aug instead of $50 before (do not underestimate parents of very yound children for the educational market - my <4 & 1/2 yr old can read anything he can get his hands on at the local Blockbusters, thanks to PCs)
- upcoming release of Windows NT that uses the Win 95 interface (Memphis I think will be a dud)
- there ain't that much capacity left out there, case in point being the 20% price increase in 6" wafer prices in Taiwan
With regrads to DRAM supply and demand (which is what ALSC is now), I think that that is pretty much in balance first part of the year and will be in shortage in Q4. I see absolutely no reason to believe that there is either huge warehouses full of held-back inventory in Korea (total hog-wash to put it bluntly) or that Koreans are severely holding back production. Also, a lot of DRAM plants that were to come online in '97 will not. e.g. (only the ones that I am aware of)
- ProMos, joint Mosel-vitelic and Seimens will come on line this X'mas
- 2 8" line in Tailand, joint venture by TI and Tailand, had gone belly up, never be built. They had already spent $300M and now is in full bankruptcy.
- 1 8" Sub-Micron fab in Taiwan, also just went belly up after spending $150M.
- Hitachi did not build one 8" line as planned
- White Oak, the 8" Motorola/Toshiba line in VA scheduled to come later this year is affected by MOT's decision to exit DRAMs. Now MOT's allocation of wafers will be used to build logic instead of DRAMs
- JV3, UMC/ALSC's joint venture is being delayed
- Winbond/Toshiba's JV will not 'come on-line till next summer'. Translated, delayed indefintely.
- Charter in Singapore originally was going to go heavy int DRAMs. I am not sure what they are going to do now, but I strongly despect thier thinking currently is not DRAMs.
- TSMC was going to build two lines, one in Oregon, one in Taiwan. These two are going ahead full speed.
- Samsung/Intel in Austin is on schedule
- Fujitsu that was talking about investing enough to be #1 at the end of '95 has quietly shut up now.
- Lehi is still on-hold after Micron spent $600M on it and then stopped the project.
- Transistion to 0.25um is not going to be as fast as people expects, lots of problems are coming up. Same with 12" wafers.
patrick tang
PS This summer is a killer, PC sales now is no reflection of anything except Intel's desire to freeze the whole PC market by announcing their deep quarterly price cuts 6 to 8 weeks before it is to take effect. This will kill everybody's Q3, but the sales will just get postponded till Q4. |
