Cooler Xtreme : News :
IT industry to suffer 'til year end
IT industry to suffer 'til year end
30//07/2001 12:07:40
Semico DRAM analysis
AN ANALYST AT Semico told the
Platform Conference in San Jose last week that the "IT industry restructuring"
will carry on for most of this year.
And in a possibly coincidental
juxtaposition with this fact, Shelly Garber of Semico, said that by 2002
"most of the inventory" will be absorbed by the market. That stock, in 2002,
will be nearly 18 months old, and any left over inventory will be scrapped,
Gerber suggested.
But Garber had good news for
those not on the scrapheap, and suggested that the "bottom of the market"
will occur in Q4 of this year, with semiconductors recovering in 2002 and
growing in revenues by 25 per cent.
PCs, Garber claimed, no longer
drive the development of new semiconductor technology. The growth segments
are broadband comms, wireless infrastructure and Internet services.
Demand for DDR SDRAM will be
hampered by the avilability of server chipset firms, while delays in G3
phones will affect demand next year. Rambus RDRAM will be decided by demand
for Pentium 4s.
Semico thinks that the 2001
forecast of $14.2 billion will decline by 50.9 per cent, the slump being
determined by the world economy, and the amount of stock piled up everywhere.
DRAM revenues will be around the $16.9 billion mark.
There will be some good bargains
in Q3, and Semico says that XP will help sales of memory, as it requires
128MB minimum, meaning 192MB is a lot better.
In 2002, SDRAM will start to
be replaced by DDR memory in the notebook market, and Semico expects that
2002 units will be up by 10 per cent.
Emerging products will help
drive demand, including game machines, arcade and gambling machines, digital
cameras, PDAs, digital TV and kiosks over the next four years.
Smartphones, whether 2.5 or
3G, will need low power memory but this will be a major new market for the
manufacturers.
Rather than consolidating, the
DRAM market is fragmenting further, with SDRAM, DDR, EDO, FPM FCRAM, RLRAM,
RDRAM, VCRAM, EDRAM, and low power devices. That's certainly a lot of RAMs.
There will be specialised kinds
of memory like the UtRAM from Samsung for cellphones, and the BAT-RAM from
Micron.
Semico, which has never been
particulary pro-Rambus, doesn't see much of a future for RDRAM, surprise
surprise.
But by 2005, DRAM wil cost a
mere $0.015 per megabit.
