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Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

bloomberg.com

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Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#81

Post by smabie »

cbanek wrote: post #48
mrspeaker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know we're being trained to hate journalists these days, but that quoted sentence is just stating a fact: the biggest drop since dotcom bubble... and the article reads very reasonable. I don't see anything controversial in there - seems to balance the negatives with things like "the rate of decline abated" and "the decline in industry sales didn’t stop investors betting on a future rebound." - how is that sensation…

As someone who watches the financial news, it almost feels more like baseball statistics, where they say something like, "this batter on sunny days in April has an advantage against left-handed pitchers." While it may be true, it feels more like p-hacking than some kind of useful fact. I felt like the financial industry was really doing this early in 2019, after the huge drop in stocks, everyone was like the S&P is u…

According to EMH, all information is subsumed into the price. As such, how could the huge 2018 Christmas drop affect future returns?

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#82

Post by _jal »

pascalxus wrote: post #76
_jal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can argue about adjective choice, but a 12% revenue drop in any industry is going to get people's attention. The environment in which that 32% drop happened involved thousands of companies failing within a short time span. I personally ended up leaving the Bay Area after being out of work for over a year. (I came back.) Just to offer some context to hang those numbers on.

I don't see that happening at all currently. The housing market is insane in the bay area, as usual, even out here in the tri-valley area. as far as livermore, houses are selling like hot-cakes, not even on the market for a week.

Didn't intend to imply we're on the edge of a tech-recession or anything close to that.

But I'm pretty sure property prices are not a leading indicator of tech crashes. In the first dot.com crash they didn't drop until after the job market carnage was well over.

https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/3-recessions-2-bu...

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#83

Post by anonsivalley652 »

Question: why then are there recent media reports that DDR4 and SSD prices going to be increased? Is this Samsung's unilateral oligopolic move, another price fixing event, a ploy to stimulate panic buying and/or some other structural move related to real ability to supply? (Yes, I remember the hyper-commodification DRAM price wars and price fixing of years gone by.)

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#84

Post by anonsivalley652 »

ksec wrote: post #28

>Revenue fell 12% to $412 billion in 2019, ....That’s the biggest drop since 2001, when industry sales slumped 32% as the dot-com bubble burst. In 2001 post Dot Com Bubble, that 32% drop was real . The 12% drop in 2019 was only due to NAND and RAM went from Record High and back to "normal". Samsung was the most profitable company in 2018 simply because NAND and DRAM. Almost everyone in Semiconductor industry is makin…

Bloomberg just dropped a pro-fossil-fuels FUD deuce on renewables by implying windmill rotor blades are clogging up landfills everywhere. I guess they can't conceive of multistage FRP recycling because they have to push their yellow journalism clickbait to make money rather than have integrity.

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#85

Post by trynumber9 »

kpmcc wrote: post #79

"hurt by a trade war between the largest chip producer, the U.S., and the largest consumer, China" This sentence confuses me. Seems like they have it backwards. Can someone clear this up?

It depends. Do you include Taiwan in China or not? If not, then yes.

In fact, U.S. is the largest manufacturer of semiconductors. In 2018, nearly half of the total semiconductor market was occupied by firms based in the U.S., according to the Factbook2019 of SIA.

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#86

Post by [deleted] »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #75
bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inter generational gains leveled off 5-6 years ago.

I have an intel chip from 6 years ago and I still feel there is hardly any reason to upgrade. It still does everything I need it to do very well. I upgraded my gpu that was about 5 years old and I saw about 3x the performance.

[deleted]

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#87

Post by baybal2 »

Repost from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20630279

Semiconductor industry is a very reliable canary for the long term economic situation. Semi industry employs top economists. It is critically important for them to have extremely thorough economics research when they decide on their financials. Fabs cost billions, and whole fab complexes close to $10B. They take many years to construct and make running.

Financing plans for them have to be done impeccably, and account for way more than capital forecasts.

The financial outlook for a fab changes dramatically depending on how the world changes during its construction. The few fragments of such report done for TSMC I saw included everything down to political, cultural, and technological black swan events.

One of the most bizarre one that they actually managed to predict was the current regulatory and sociocultural "dotcom backlash".

For example, they see big server chip buyers like Facebook, Amazon, Google greatly scaling down their ambitions, and therefore they did not include the option for big reticle sizes in their lithography equipment buy list.

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#88

Post by barbecue_sauce »

smabie wrote: post #81
cbanek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who watches the financial news, it almost feels more like baseball statistics, where they say something like, "this batter on sunny days in April has an advantage against left-handed pitchers." While it may be true, it feels more like p-hacking than some kind of useful fact. I felt like the financial industry was really doing this early in 2019, after the huge drop in stocks, everyone was like the S&P is u…

According to EMH, all information is subsumed into the price. As such, how could the huge 2018 Christmas drop affect future returns?

Maybe EMH isn't correct?

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#89

Post by snoshy »

c256 wrote: post #80
cbanek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who watches the financial news, it almost feels more like baseball statistics, where they say something like, "this batter on sunny days in April has an advantage against left-handed pitchers." While it may be true, it feels more like p-hacking than some kind of useful fact. I felt like the financial industry was really doing this early in 2019, after the huge drop in stocks, everyone was like the S&P is u…

> As someone who watches the financial news, it almost feels more like baseball statistics... If you hear a loud banging noise, don’t buy?

GP's point is that someone predicting a bang based on increasingly obscure and cherry-picked data does not in fact reliably predict a real bang in the future.

Re: Chip industry had worst sales year since dot-com bubble burst

#90

Post by dr_zoidberg »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #75
bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inter generational gains leveled off 5-6 years ago.

I have an intel chip from 6 years ago and I still feel there is hardly any reason to upgrade. It still does everything I need it to do very well. I upgraded my gpu that was about 5 years old and I saw about 3x the performance.

The last few years have been mostly about performance per watt. I changed my notebook a couple of years ago, jumped from an i3 3200 to an i5 7200U. I got 80% better performance (on numerical code) at 15W, instead of 35W for the i3. Unfortunately manufacturers cheaped out on the battery, so I went from 6 cell to 3 cell, for about-ish the same battery life I had on my previous notebook.
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