IC design boom transition 3 major private indicators

When everyone is still guessing whether the business climate in 2012 is good or bad, business people who have been immersed in Taiwan's IC design industry for 10 years will come up with some private housing indicators that predict economic prosperity. They think that the dry season of upstream semiconductor industry orders is very It may end before the end of the first quarter of 2012. Because the big bosses have seen all the bad things, the business representatives have seen even worse, the number of customer inventory days has been calculated on a daily basis, and the capacity utilization rate of the Integrated Component Factory (IDM) plant has started to decline. The above three indicators all tell us that the global terminal The market demand and the semiconductor industry boom have not been far from the bottom. The difference is only when it will rise. Speculative guessing is guessing that the second quarter of 2012 will have the lowest chance of error.

For domestic and foreign wafer suppliers, guess when the demand will not be accurate, because the entire technology industry chain, there are too many relay stations for production and processing, but to see the demand remains bottomed out, but it is accurate, because customers When the order visibility is equal to zero, it is the bottom. After all, there is no possibility that the order quantity will be negative.

At the time when the visibility of orders approached zero, it occurred once in 2004 and in the first quarter of 2008. After that, it triggered a frenzy of wafer inventories. Faced with the lack of confidence in 2012 and the visibility of customer orders, there was also a case where there was no spread, and whether the story of the end of the game was staged as expected, everyone looked with wide eyes.

In addition to the important indicator that order visibility is approaching zero, it is also possible to use some industrial features to determine if the economy has bottomed out. Clean C first is that the boss must be conservative on the prospects, and even partial is not optimistic, because, in the case that the company's bosses are not good, the business representatives who rely on performance bonuses can instantly pull the company’s quarterly and annual targets down. , to earn performance to reach, and even the last leading bonus arbitrage space. After the recent Taiwanese science and technology industry leaders are worried about the emergence of the 2012 business climate trend, most business people who have seen the wind have begun to propose conservative versions, and even the most conservative version of the company's performance targets, in preparation for future advance performance.

Second, the customer grasps the inventory too tightly, from the original monthly demand calculation, grasping a reasonable wafer inventory level of 1 to 2 months, began to use the week's demand to estimate, or even "pervert" to the daily demand. Calculations; In the worsening of the economy, even to the bottom of the bottom, the monthly, weekly, and even daily basis of customer demand will have been worse and worse, and the worst idea has been used to estimate a reasonable wafer inventory level. Ironically, if deviations occur, once the short bills and urgent bills appear, the situation will be reversed instantaneously. From the original phenomenon of oversupply, it will become in short supply.上述C The above situation has been seen in the industry in the fourth quarter of 2011, and may be intensified in the first quarter of 2012.

Finally, the decline in the capacity utilization rate of the international IDM manufacturers, because many IDM plants have adopted a flexible Fab-Lite strategy, which means rapid changes in the economy.