If you look strictly at bookings data, it does appear that things are
coming closer to bottoming out. Instead of 12% month-to-month
decreases as we were experiencing, April was down 2.5% compared to
March. This all refers to data averaged over 3 mnths. Removing the
effect of the three-month averaging, this means that bookings in the
month of April were about 7.5% less than in January.
Month Shipments Bookings Book-to-Bill
November 97 1,634.1 1,633.1 1.00
December 97 1,559.3 1,550.3 0.99
January 98 1,458.0 1,363.6 0.94
February 98 (final) 1,369.1 1,233.5 0.90
March 98 (revised) 1,342.9 1,102.1 0.82
April 98 (preliminary) 1,353.4 1,074.0 0.79 |
