UPDATE - Chip equipment orders rise in November
Wednesday December 18, 8:50 pm ET
biz.yahoo.com
SAN JOSE, Calif, Dec 18 (Reuters) - Orders for semiconductor equipment from North American manufacturers ticked higher in November over the trailing quarter, but were still down from levels earlier this year, a sign new technology demand remains on hold, data released on Wednesday showed.
The three-month average of worldwide semiconductor equipment bookings, or new orders, in November rose to $779 million, said trade group Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International.
That was slightly above the $775 million in orders posted in October and 32 percent greater than the $589 million posted a year earlier, when the industry was only beginning to pull itself out of the worst downturn in decades, SEMI statistics show.
Equipment billings, a measure of the value of equipment accepted by customers and booked as revenue, was $991 billion in November. That was down 1 percent from the adjusted October level of $1 billion and up 21 percent from the $817 million posted a year earlier, the San Jose, California-based industry group said.
North American manufacturers of equipment used to make semiconductors, the brains of computers and other electronics, represent more than half the total world market.
"The current booking levels, down from highs earlier in the year, reflect the uncertainty facing the semiconductor industry as the New Year approaches, although the overall mood in the industry is that conditions will improve in 2003," Stanley Myers, president and chief executive of SEMI, said in a statement.
The industry saw an "abnormal peak" in July with orders at $1.18 billion, but orders had dropped since then until November, said SEMI spokesman Michael Droeger. "We're just on a very bumpy bottom," he added.
That's evident elsewhere. For instance, Applied Materials Inc. (NasdaqNM:AMAT - News), the industry's dominant supplier, is one week into a three-week forced shutdown for nonessential employees, according to a company spokesman.
Basically, consumers and corporations need to start buying computers and other electronic devices again for any recovery to ripple through the industry to semiconductor equipment manufacturers, an analyst said.
"We do not think the event (book-to-bill statistics) provides any investment opportunity," Banc of America Securities' analyst Mark Fitzgerald wrote ahead of the report. "End market strength is still the key to sustaining the recovery in capital equipment spending."
The monthly data shows a ratio of orders to billings -- known as the book-to-bill ratio -- of 0.79, meaning that only $79 worth in new orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month, reflecting the extent of the industry slump. In periods of industry health, by contrast, bookings outpace billings.
A SEMI survey released two weeks ago found that equipment makers expect 2002 sales to decline by about a third this year but to rise about 15 percent in 2003. |
