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

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (47703)	6/7/2001 12:10:51 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Katherine, Thank you for saying much more than I and much more succinctly. Perhaps SI should require its posters to go to journalism school. ;^) Ian.

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (47703)	6/7/2001 3:58:20 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

This is just a thought, but perhaps "indexing" could be a solution. For example, one could use TSM, UMC, and say Intel as a proxy for capacity utilization for logic fabs and Samsung and Micron as a proxy for DRAM fabs, and so on. Then knowing half a dozen data points, one could perhaps come to a reasonable estimate of total capacity and fab utilizations. Using this method then we may (I have not run the numbers) conclude that fab utilization for logic chips has been ~35% in Q2. When SIA reports its global sales number for average of Q2, then using these fab utilization estimates we'd be able to approximate all the info we need. Of course we can only do this if (a) various fabs do not vary too much from one another so an index can be representative of them. And (b) there are companies that regularly publish their utilization. I think that Charter said they're utilization was going to be 30%, but I don't know how many others report these numbers or how frequently they report it. ST