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

To: Clarksterh who wrote (22084)	7/23/1998 10:24:00 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Several market research firms track unit shipments. I get most of my data from ICE (www.ice-corp.com). They don't necessarily provide a good measure of demand, though. In particular, the market can probably absorb as much $1/MB memory as the fabs can pump out. (You can never have too much money, too many friends, or too much memory.) Problem is that the DRAM makers make little if any money at $1/MB, hence the recent attempts by Samsung and others to cut production and drive prices up. One measure of demand vs. capacity is fab utilization. My information on that (it's running as low as 50% for some foundries, 70-80% is probably a good industry average figure) comes from a variety of published sources, particularly the Wall Street Journal and TechWeb. Primary sources include SEMI, the SIA (and their overseas counterparts), and a wide variety of named and unnamed individuals. Another useful demand indicator is underlying electronic sales. PC growth (the largest sector) is expected to be about 10% this year, which is pretty anemic for that industry (ICE). Worse, much of the growth is at the low end, where margins for box makers and chip makers are even tinier than in the rest of the PC business. Sorry to ramble around a bit. Hope this helps. Katherine