The Week In Review: Oct. 22
By Mark LaPedus
Intel reported quarterly revenue of $13.5 billion and net income of $3.0 billion. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-reports-third-quarter-revenue-200100019.html C.J. Muse, an analyst with Barclays Capital, said: “Intel lowered its capex guidance to $11.3 billion for 2012 vs. our estimate of $11.8 billion. While we believe Intel will remain vigilant in the ramp of 14nm, as Intel looks to aggressively redirect space and equipment to 14nm (80-90% of equipment bought at 22nm is reusable at 14nm node), we see capex of ~$9 billion +/- $1 billion in 2013.”
Is AMD on the ropes again? AMD will cut its workforce by approximately 15%. It also announced revenue for the third quarter of 2012 of $1.27 billion and a loss of $157 million. “Management’s ongoing mis-execution in our opinion seems to be contributing to building too much inventory, firing top operational managers, channel misalignment (and) withdrawing from broad swaths of the market,” said Craig Berger, an analyst with FBR. Meanwhile, analyst, Hans Mosesmann of Raymond James, said: “The worrisome but not too surprising commentary by AMD management was that the PC market will take several quarters to recover. AMD now considers 85% of its current business ‘legacy’ PC, with the planned restructuring focused on attacking various adjacent high-volume markets.”
Seeking to accelerate the development of EUV lithography, ASML has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cymer for $2.6 billion. “Cymer’s light source is critical to EUV success and given recent slippage of key metrics, we think it makes sense for the technology to move in-house at ASML,” Muse said.
In response to its foundry rivals, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) has updated and accelerated its finFET roadmap.
GlobalFoundries could employ as many as 3,000 workers at its Malta plant, according to reports.
STMicroelectronics’ 28nm Fully Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FDSOI) process, which uses substrates from Soitec, is now available for prototyping to universities, research labs and design companies through the silicon brokerage services provided by CMP.
Soitec announced total consolidated sales of 130.2 million euros for the first half, down by 19.9% on a yearly basis.
European government representatives, consortia and suppliers discussed 450mm fabs at Semicon Europa in Dresden.
North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted a book-to-bill ratio of 0.81 in September, compared to 0.84 in August, according to SEMI.
Mentor Graphics has rolled out a formal-based technology in the Questa Verification Platform. In addition, Mentor announced new capabilities to complement TSMC’s 20nm manufacturing processes. Meanwhile, SpringSoft and Mentor announced that the Laker-Calibre RealTime custom layout flow has been selected for the TSMC Custom Design Reference Flow. In a related announcement, TSMC has presented Mentor with two “Partner of the Year 2012” awards in various categories. And, Mentor announced the winners of its 24th annual PCB Technology Leadership Awards.
At the Storage Networking World (SNW) conference, there was no shortage of SSD presentations. But none of the keynoters who shared their data center experiences had deployed any SSDs in their systems. This seemed particularly odd to The SSD Guy.
Amazon is in talks to buy the mobile chip business of Texas Instruments. TI’s chips are used in Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet.
FormFactor completed its acquisition of Astria Semiconductor Holdings and its subsidiary MicroProbe.
Lam Research achieved revenue of $906.9 million, up 22.3% from prior quarter, in first full quarter of consolidated results with Novellus. “Based on continued push-outs of NAND spending, Lam guided to December quarter revenues of $820-880 million, well below consensus of $927 million,” said Barclay’s Muse. “While management had previously suggested that 2012 WFE was tracking to the low end of the $29-30 billion outlook, management took the opportunity to lower their 2012 WFE outlook to about $28-29 billion.”
Xilinx announced fiscal Q2 2013 sales of $543.9 million, down 7% sequentially and down 2% from the second quarter of the prior fiscal year. Barclay’s Muse said: “Xilinx reported mixed September quarter results and then guided to worse December quarter, highlighting continued macro pressure for semis.”
Microchip Technology has lowered its forecast. “Our lower than anticipated net sales activity in the September quarter was driven primarily by macroeconomic and industry conditions,” said Steve Sanghi, Microchip’s president and CEO. “The overall global economic outlook continues to be poor and is adversely impacting our business as well as the rest of the semiconductor industry.”
Marvell expects net revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2013 will be in the range of $765 million to $785 million, compared with prior outlook of between $800 million to $850 million. “The continued slowdown in the global economy during the third quarter is resulting in a weaker PC market than previously anticipated and thus lower demand from our storage HDD customers,” said Sehat Sutardja, Marvell’s chairman and CEO. FBR’s Berger said: “We think Marvell has a structural management problem that inhibits the firm from realizing real change, may discourage the development of formalized engineering processes, and keeps the firm on what seems to be a self-destructive path of no growth and limited traction in cellular. With the board unwilling to make real changes, business at Marvell could migrate from bad to worse over time.”
The NAND and NOR flash memory market landscape is shifting rapidly, with increasingly sophisticated mobile handsets playing a leading role in driving industry trends and determining which suppliers will be successful, according to IHS iSuppli.
Tags: Amazon, AMD, ASML, Astria Semiconductor Holdings, Barclay's Capital, Cymer, FD-SOI, FinFETs, flash memory, FormFactor, GlobalFoundries, IHS iSuppli, Intel, Lam Research, Marvell, Mentor Graphics, Microchip Technology, MicroProbe, Raymond James, SEMI, Semicon Europa, Soitec, SSD, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, TSMC, Xilinx