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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (2080)	8/5/2002 12:40:51 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Respond to of 25522

VC Funding Fuels Chip Rebound Hopes Arik Hesseldahl, 08.05.02, 12:00 PM ET forbes.com NEW YORK - There wasn't much in the way of surprises in the latest Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) numbers, which were released on Friday: Times are bad, and June sales were up a paltry 5.8%, to $11.35 billion, over May. Every little bit of progress helps--but the key word here is "little." The same problems that have been plaguing the semiconductor industry continue to throw cold water on growth prospects. The PC and telecom sectors remain weak and chip sales in each have fallen off dramatically. National Semiconductor (nyse: NSM - news - people ), which last week cut its fiscal first-quarter sales forecast, said sales growth from the last quarter would be flat. By Friday afternoon, the already-anemic Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had reacted to the spate of bad news by giving up 3.4% of its value. The only good news, the SIA said, was in the area of chips for wireless devices and consumer electronics. Specifically, digital signal processors--which go into mobile phones and the new generation of wireless-ready handheld computers--are still showing strength despite the depressed state of wireless handset sales. That's good news for companies like Texas Instruments (nyse: TXN - news - people ) and Cirrus Logic (nasdaq: CRUS - news - people ), among others. The other niche that is performing reasonably well is flash memory chips, which aside from PC microprocessors is the other space where Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) and Advanced Micro Devices (nyse: AMD - news - people ) compete head-to-head. More uninspiring numbers are due out this week from the trade group Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) concerning second-quarter demand for semiconductor wafers. But if you're looking for positive news in the semiconductors sector, the best hope might be to look at current levels of venture capital activity. While the conventional wisdom is that we won't see a return to anything like the overheated sales growth of 2000 until at least 2004, there's one side benefit to every historical downturn: Chip designers with good ideas never stop working--they get funding and start new companies. The Fabless Semiconductor Association today released its second quarterly Fabless Fundings report, measuring venture capital activity among fabless semiconductor firms during the second quarter of this year. Given the state of the chip industry in general, the survey's findings are encouraging. In the first half of the year, fabless chip companies landed 61 funding deals totaling $962.5 million, with the average deal coming in at about $15.7 million each. While that's below the level of funding deals for the same period last year--when 90 companies landed $1.43 billion in funding--the pot of funding handed out exceeds by $40 million that of the first half of 2000, at the height of the chip industry's last boom period. The biggest deal so far this year, according to FSA, was a $56 million fourth round for Mellanox Technologies, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm developing chips for a technology called Infiniband, which is used in high-end servers. Investors include Intel, Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ), Dell Computer (nasdaq: DELL - news - people ) and Bessemer Venture Partners among others. The biggest first-round funding deal was for $22.5 million and went to TelASIC Communications, which develops wireless chips. Its investors include Redpoint Ventures and defense contractor Raytheon (nyse: RTN - news - people ). But there's a long way to go before this year's funding reaches the full-year totals attained in the previous two years, which have run about $2.5 billion each year. Predicting how venture capital activity will ultimately affect the wider market of publicly traded chip companies is not easy. Startups with good ideas survive to go public or be acquired, while others die on the vine. But given the depressing state of almost every other aspect of the chip market, the continued faith of venture capitalists--conservative though it may be--indicates a badly needed ray of hope.