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

To: StanX Long who wrote (58777)	1/14/2002 4:32:58 AM
From: StanX Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Shell-Shocked Industry Looks for Recovery Will boom follow the bust of 2001? By Jeff Chappell -- Electronic News, 1/14/2002 e-insite.net Pacific Grove, Calif.—The semiconductor industry, sitting in the corner licking its wounds, has to get better, analysts said, if for no other reason than it can't get much worse. The obvious question on everyone's mind here at last week's Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International's (SEMI) 25th annual Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) was how and when the industry will recover from 2001. The year 2002 is only two weeks old and already people have labeled 2001 the perfect storm or the 100-year flood event. Perhaps Bill McClean, president of IC Insights, summed it up best during his presentation when he said, "We laid a big egg in 2001. … Anything that could go wrong, did go wrong." At the 2001 ISS, Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research Inc., gave the bottom range of his forecast for industry growth as being down 30 percent to 40 percent. "I had no idea that's what it would really be like," Hutcheson said at this year's event. "I don't really believe it can get much worse than this." Hutcheson said that the chip equipment market dropped 37.6 percent in 2001 and will dip another 5 percent this year, even as the IC industry enjoys positive growth of 20.6 percent. Gartner Dataquest predicted the chip equipment market will shrink 19 percent this year, even as the chip market grows by 3 percent. The year 2001 has changed dramatically and permanently the way the industry views itself, McClean said. He pointed out that for the first time in history, electronic system sales declined in 2001, and dramatically at that, by 10 percent. "I can't emphasize how important that number is. … It's a tremendous change," said McClean, noting that it could happen again, as the rate of year-over-year growth in the industry slows down over the coming years from the 20 percent growth rates it has enjoyed in the past.