Re: Year of the Tiger
Great article Gus! Lots of meaty and relevant discussion in there:
"1998 has gotten off to a rainy start, and the first two quarters may continue to see weak prices for DRAMs," said Tsugio Makimoto, executive vice president of Hitachi Ltd.'s electronic devices division. "Things may improve toward the end of the year."
I read this to mean "I hope like the dickens things get better toward the end of the year, because otherwise we're so screwed!"
<g>
If capital budgets are cut, it may affect the transition to 300-mm wafers.
Look out AMAT and NVLS investors! Uh oh, what's this PRIA doing in my portfolio? (Besides losing me money!@*#$)
...hard-disk-drive media factory in the Philippines ... will help Fujitsu overcome an inability to meet demand for its newest drive products, said a spokesman.
I'd like get some of whatever that spokesman is smoking. <gg> Maybe it'll distract me from ADPT <*cry*>
But now, Taiwan's semiconductor industry is shifting resources from DRAMs to logic, threatening overcapacity in the logic sector as well, and analysts say Korean companies may follow suit.
This could bode ill for LSI / ALTR / XLNX / AMD / LSCC on top of the exchange-rate sickness already afflicting them. That huge Taiwanese fab base is like a crowd of in-laws always forcing their way into parties where they're not welcome ...
The current price of DRAMs--less than $2 for a 16-Mbit part--has long since passed the $3 production cost and is fast approaching its $1.50 variable cost.
A telling bit of news. Microeconomics theory would predict DRAM prices to fall to exactly $1.50, assuming those numbers are correct. I'd sure like to see the analysis that generated those cost numbers.
"The DRAM producers are still not far enough along on the learning curve to make the 64-Mbit price competitive. They need to improve their yields, test times as well as burn/test costs."
Good news for test companies (TER, CMOS, ASTSF, KLAC)
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