No Price Wars?

Give the chart below the hairy eyeball and then tell me there is not pricing pressure in the IC industry (click on the chart for a larger version): Maybe I am hallucinating (again) but it looks to me like IC average selling prices are breaking into new territory. Gosh, one might even suggest this little excursion will get more pronounced as the overhead comes out of Flash Memory. I'm still working on those charts I mentioned yesterday. Will get them to subscribers ASAP. Comments and questions are welcome.

Regional Breakdown of Capital Equipment Market

The 2005 regional breakdown of total semiconductor capital equipment bookings, as detailed in SEMI's SEMS database, is shown in the pie chart below: 61% of all bookings last year were from companies based in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. China is still a small part of the overall picture. $30,104,641 was the total bookings level for the industry in '05. We've heard that bookings have moved up substantially in the most recent quarterly reporting period although there are a few indications that the pace of growth is slowing. I was told that by two people from the industry this afternoon. Add a hair more than 20% to these numbers and you get the same level of equipment bookings recorded in '04. Is that possible? Clearly the first half of this year looks decent. It's the second half that is really questionable. I'll pull together some more charts this evening and post them at the site for subscribers tomorrow morning. Those charts will portray more granularity. Equipment areas that will be charted will include: Mask/Reticle; Wafer Manufacturing; Wafer Process; Expose and Write Equipment; Resist Processing; Etch; Surface Conditioning and Dry; Thermal Processing; Ion Implant; CVD; Sputter (PVD); Inspection and Measurement; Assembly and Packaging; Fab Facilities; Test (Memory, SOC and Logic); Test Related Equipment. Feel free to subscribe if you want all the data. Subscription links are on the left and here: http://www.infras.com/monsub.html

Model Portfolio Changes

Model Portfolio Changes First day of March... Time to start trading like a Lion. Posted a few trade suggestions in the Model Portfolio section this evening. We'll be making some other adjustments during the coming days. As I mentioned in my last post these are "Anxious Moments" for investors. A few more sell-side analysts have moved to the dark side and there is news that demand may not be as strong as orginally anticipated. The wall of worry is pretty high these days. The hunch here is that there is another run to the upside.