Chip makers' revenue is at its highest level in years and unabated demand for electronic equipment from the consumer and corporate markets is driving surging component demand. The prospects for continued industry expansion is so strong that it's almost impossible to hear any negative comments from leading industry executives. Mike Despotes, senior vice president of sales and component marketing at NEC Electronics Inc., called the first six months of this year outstanding. Over at Agilent Technologies Inc., Bill Sullivan, a senior vice president and general manager of the semiconductor group, said growth was robust. Dave Cot , vice president of communications ASSPs at Integrated Device Technology Inc., said sales were up across the board.
Demand is just mind-boggling.
And we expect this to continue, certainly in the near term. Indeed, the impressive industry growth that buoyed confidence, inventories, and stock prices is forecast to continue for the next several months, if not longer. The surging use of new communications gear, from routers and switches to digital-video disk players and assorted handheld devices, is creating phenomenal demand for a wide variety of components, especially DSPs, flash memory, microprocessor blocks, and memory chips. We're not in the first inning of this cycle, that's for sure, Joseph said. But I think it's still only inning six or seven.