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Technology Stocks : Semi Equipment Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Donald Wennerstrom who wrote (56676)	6/25/2012 1:13:59 PM
From: robert b furman	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 95378

Don,Kirk, and Rts, You all have posted many great posts on this thread over the years. I get the feeling that the semi market is a market of have and have nots. The biggest difference is you sell cheaply to apple or you do not. AAPL has been so dominant that Rimm Nokia,Palm,Motorola have been decimated - in so far as smart phones are concerned. I think the semi orders have not been coming, since every effort to make a competitive product has been doused with cold water by the next superior rendition of an aapl product.Samsung has been a competitor and a supplier for aapl and its cloning has brought market share gains along with aapl and of course law suits from aapl. These last 3-4 months have givin us a growing B2B as leading edge products are about to give the phone tablet,and laptop sectors a new growing list of enties. Unique to aapls dominance has been a marked absence of Intel and Microsoft products - this will hopefully be resolved soon. Appl's long use of non leading edge processors and grophics - but with energy efficient designs trumping speed has been part of the success formula. I think the B2B improvement is not sector wide hope for improvement - but I do thionk the sweet spot will be with in the logic mpu and memory (ssd) sub sectors. A combination of faster processing and better battery life ALL packed into a mobil device will breath competition into the semi sector. We need to strong horses to run in a race so far AAPL has lapped every body. The good news in all this is AAPL has created two new sectors which utilize a lot of chips. This is why the semi sales has surprised every one with cumulative sales revenue records. As this second half unfolds - I'm hopeful new entries will create better mouse traps. When the margins start coming out of aapl's dominant revenue - we'll know we're seeing competition. Competition reduces prices and creates end user demand. End user demand creates high fab utilization rates and that creatse semi equipment orders. With the recent slight bump up in B2B I think we are seeing leading edge investments going in place. I do not think we're seeing end user demand driving Capex -we are seeing the early stages of leading tech. These early stages have been delayed and canceled several times. AAPLS superior product has cancelled many inferior attempts. Make no mistake Intel is aware that aapl has created some markets that are big enough for their fabs to benefit from. Micros soft may well be slow but they are a big gun and have staying power with many other leading niches,PC's and cloud just 2 biggies - not to mention data farms and servers. Otellini said it well."last year we were planning on being the processor for Nokia and they cancelled,waiting to utilize the Microsoft 8 that's coming in H2 of 2012. There's no doubt that these types of delays have ramifications - ramifications that delay brilliant competitive products and no doubt they are to aapl's advantage and continued dominance. We are in a lull that has been created by the delay of competitive products which are intended to utilize the leading edge designs. It is a tribute to aapls dominance that the delays are longer than expected. I for one want to see some competition in here. The equipment makers have gone through a very large consolidation.It is hard to imagine no more Nvls and Vsea. Lrcx and Amat ares urely better companies with the merger of these great leaders. The equipment sector has slugged it out for 2 decades and is now more flat production oriented with stockhoilders getting solid dividends and less peaks and valleys in stock pricing. Yes my SI friends we too are getting older.<smile> I just wish we could have once again be in favor. I think it will be the dividend payout increases and fortress like balance sheets that bring investors into our sector again. Most importantly we need growth brought by superior processes and destructive technologies that are enabling. I believe we are on the edge of such a time. Bob