President Barack Obama has been spending considerable time on East-West trade agreements while in Asia, but for one chip maker, the negotiations between China and Taiwan are even more important.
The rush by Asian liquid-crystal-display makers to ramp up production at home and to invest in new plants threatens to curtail the nascent recovery in the flat-panel market.
LCD makers in Asia have just started to see their earnings recover in the second quarter after prices began to rise thanks to production cuts made last year, component shortages and strong demand from China.
Consumers are helping pull the technology sector out of one of its worst-ever slumps, and optimism is building that businesses may also start switching on their spending soon.
That upbeat picture emerged as some bellwether technology suppliers issued numbers that were stronger than Wall Street expected, though still reflecting the recession’s harsh effects.
Asia’s share of the world’s online population will swell to 43 percent in four years, while North America will represent just 13 percent of Internet users, according to a new report by Forrester Research.
There’s considerable doom and gloom hanging over this week’s Semicon West trade show in San Francisco. The event hosts suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and materials, one of the hardest-hit sectors in technology. Globalfoundries is one of few bright spots.
Are things picking up at Nokia?
Maybe… or at least, they seem to be getting worse at a decelerating rate.
RBC Capital’s Mark Sue this morning repeated his Outperform rating on the stock and lifted his price target to $16, from $12, asserting that the company’s operating margins in mobile device many have bottomed. “It’s been the most volatile global handset quarter since we can remember, yet the shock to the system seems to be dissipating,” he writes.
It’s been clear for a couple of months now that few people are buying PCs–and that those who are buying are extremely cheap. On Monday, a report from Morgan Stanley gave the latest estimate of how declining prices and frugal consumers will affect the industry over the next couple of years. The findings aren’t encouraging.
Piper Jaffray’s Jesse Pichel chopped his target price for Evergreen Solar in half this morning, from $5 to $2.50, after disappointing Q4 results. His cautious approach is also a result of what he sees as a possible lack of resources to execute expansion and outsourcing plans in Asia.
Cisco, true to its word, began reducing its headcount this week. Drastically. Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets, noticed that the total number of the company’s job listings has fallen 93 percent in the last week. Rakers isn’t specific about how many of those jobs are in Silicon Valley, but job-listing businesses advertising on the radio in the Bay Area may want to change their recession-defying promises of “thousands of job openings” to “thousands of applicants.”
Marvell (MVRL) shares are down sharply again today, pressured this morning by Deutsche Bank analyst Arnab Chanda, who cut his rating on the stock to Hold from Buy. He cut his target price on the stock to $15 from $20.
This morning, the market is suffering in Dell (DELL) hell.
Last night, the company posted results for its fiscal second quarter ended July, which beat the Street impressively on the top line, but at the cost of lower-than-expected gross margins, resulting in a miss at the EPS level.
Microchip (MCHP) shares are headed lower in early trading after J.P. Morgan semiconductor analyst Christopher Danely cut his rating on the stock to Neutral from Overweight.
In a research note, Danely says that the move reflects “a slowdown in the Chinese consumer end market and the stock’s high valuation.”
EMI, one of the global music majors, is shutting down some of its offices in Asia. Offices in Thailand and Singapore have already been shuttered, while regional headquarters in Hong Kong are ready for the grim reaper. All of this is part of the right-sizing moves EMI has been making; it had earlier announced plans to cut thousands of jobs worldwide.
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