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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (7073)	10/5/1998 7:19:00 PM
From: Grand Poobah	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10921

Ian, Only 150 fabs worldwide does seem a little low. I would think the big guys (INTC, MOT, etc.) would have somewhere around 10 fabs each. However, not all of those will be leading-edge fabs. So the 75 number for leading-edge fabs might be close. Here's how I figure it. A leading edge fab will have about 15,000 wafer starts a month, and sell the chips from each wafer for about $5000, so it will produce about $1 billion in revenue every year. The actual numbers may vary a little, but I think it's a good ballpark estimate. So what is the total semiconductor industry revenue for a year? Divide by a billion, and you have a rough estimate of the number of worldwide fabs (within maybe a factor of 2). There are probably more fabs than that because there are more that produce less than 15k wafers/mo than there are fabs that produce more than 15k wafers/mo. I do remember the mention of planned fab numbers >100 a few years ago, but that probably included those planned only in the minds of executives and never resulting in orders at the semi-equips or blueprints at the construction companies. Regards, G.P.