LSI's consumer chip market is growing somewhere in the 35-40% area. DVD and others are well into the 50+% area. Std. cell revenues are forecast to grow at 30%+ and LSI is doing better than that. So they ought to be able to absorb the design shrink problem and we hope they do because it likely will be big trouble if they do not do a good job forecasting demand and bringing supply on line to meet it.
Shane, thanks for the quick recap of the positives working in favor of LSI. I've read'em before, but forgotten most of them just as quickly due to my information overload addiction. Although I recognize their alliance with Cisco in the networking field is probably a good thing, I am rooting for bay in the same manner I hoped apple would eventually topple the microsoft monster....sigh. This is one area I would love to see LSI, or rather cisco, see minimal growth.
As a person who still has a rotary phone in the home, it is difficult for me to see continued growth (let alone the past explosion) of cell phone sales, but I suppose they will. With the trend toward systems on a chip, ala NSM in personal computers, or vitesse/anadigics/triquint/vlsi? wrt cell phones, it also seems to me that the number of chips required for each piece of equipment is declining even as more hardware is being sold. In my limited growth mindset this is another negative factor mitigating chip demand for the chip makers.
For LSI's sake, I certainly hope their chips are/remain proprietary in nature; learned painfully what can happen when a property becomes a commodity thanks to atmel and flash memory & s3 and video chips. It sure isn't pretty when that happens. They sold more and more chips, but prices fell even faster than they could shove them out the door.
All in all, I wish LSI would come back to me. I feel like I might have just missed the train!
barry |
