Paying down debt to improve the balance sheet: suggests they will be cautious regarding capital spending.
He didn't just suggest it, he flatly said it. And I will flatly say, there won't be any new fabs coming from Micron or Sandisk for at least 2 or 3 years. Micron clearly doesn't need new fabs, they will be getting new capacity from Elpida.
My opinion, as I said in the last post, is that Samsung and Hynix are going to 3D because they know that they are behind the cost curve right now, and want to try to skip ahead, not unlike Micron did maybe 7 years ago or so--they skipped the 5x generation, I believe it was. But that was a different kind of thing than skipping to 3D from 2D. Especially, if, as Sandisk, Micron and AMAT say, it isn't really ready yet to be competitive with leading edge 2D, which is where Micron and Sandisk are. |
