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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (47698)	6/7/2001 11:27:12 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

>>There are far too many moving parts to guesstimate capacity utilization knowing only the Total annual $ sales volume. << I agree, although I tend to attack the question from the opposite direction. It's possible to get reasonably accurate estimates of global capacity in terms of millions of square inches of silicon. But converting that number (raw silicon capacity) to unit or dollar capacity is going to be darn near impossible without lots of information about the global product mix, capacity by feature size, etc. Then, even if you could calculate global capacity in dollar terms, you still couldn't get a good utilization number given only annual sales volume. How many discrete fabs running at 100% does it take to equal the sales of one P4 fab running at 50%? Even if you could get a global utilization number, I'm not sure how useful it would be. The break-even utilization varies enormously depending on product mix and process technology, so the utilization required to trigger new capacity buys also varies. Katherine