Industry Year Getting Better

March’s WSTS again confirmed our January IFS forecast that 2011 was going to be a very strong industry year, despite the WSTS ‘restatement’ that ‘lost’ US$1.5 billion (a whopping 7%!) from previously reported sales; hardly a restatement.  Worse still, this was predominantly in MOS Logic (US$ 0.5 billion, 8%) and MOS Micro (US$ 1.0 billion, 19%) and predominately in February making the original errors so big they ought to have been spotted and challenged well before the numbers were published.  The errors make no difference to our analysis and forecast trends as we do not rely on ‘models’ based on agonising over every single month’s data point.  We have long criticised this practise as too short-sighted and meaningless, given the supply side of this business has time lags and lead-times measured in years.  ‘D-’ for the WSTS for releasing ‘sloppy’ numbers; ‘A+’ to those in the industry focused on long-term trends and the underlying issues.

Posted By: Jo Humphries

Date: 09-Jun-2011

Category: Industry Related Comments