

Wonder how long these big players can sustain with this kind of growth if this is the reality ? CMIIW



More giant consolidations to come ? May be its time to review thoroughly related stocks portfolios ?



You bet more consolidation is coming. i left the semiconductor industry 6 months ago. The writing is on the wall. All the 'old boys' are hurting like hell. No investment , the new technologies are super expensive to implement and they get their lunch eaten by megafabs like TSMC and UMC and Chartered that have the technologies.The time of the traditional design-fab semicon house if over. Nimble design houses can spin a design much faster than the big lumbering companies.Here is the dirty laundry :- the big semicon companies have outdated fabs, or fabs with some specialty technologies. if they can't monetize in the specialty techs their fabs are worthless. They cannot compete against the far east. they are two or three generations behind. Only the true big boys (Intel , Samsung , Toshiba ) can still do that. All the rest is obsolete tech. There have been instances where top 10 or top 15 ( but not top 3 ) companies have put in money to build a fab together to try to get into this really hi end stuff. and failed miserably. you can not compete against tsmc and umc.- so they need to monetize their fabs somehow. so they restrict their designs to stuff they can run in their own fab. This again is fine for specialty stuff , but does not work for the mass volume stuff. By forcing your design team to use sub-par technology you are slitting your own throat.Look at what is happening with ESP, skyworks and some others right now. It is a bloodbath. they are machine gunning the big boys.For those not in the know :ESP and skyworks make wifi, bluetooth and gps chipsets. These companies are fabless. they design the chip and have it made by tsmc.They are not restricted to outdated technology, they don't have the cost overhead of sustaining a fab, can use the latest technology. These guys spin those kinds of chips faster than any 'desgin+fab' company out there.The traditional suppliers are still screwing around with 'modules' ( a circuit board with a chip , some passives, and external combiner and an antenna ) , where the 'new generation' guys have single chips , all integrated (including the antenna) chips. 1/4 of the size , 1/2 the power consumption and 1/2 the price. So what are you going to do ?the big boys are caught between two dilemma' :- killing their fab and laying off 4/5 off their workforce to become design only. That's not going to fly, for multiple reasons, customer trust being 1, discontinuation of a lot of products being 2 .- keep lumbering on with existing technology that hampers their progress.the third alternative would be selling the fab , but nobody wants em as they are outdated.The only remaining solution is mega-mergers. But my feeling is that is just postponing the inevitable...The only traditional players ( in the sense of being fab+design) are the niche players like Analog devices , Linear Tech. They don't have to deal with second-source , nor are they doing second-source.Look at the others. How much money can you really still make of an LM324 if there are at least 5 companies making that thing. Why do you even keep that in your fab...The big boys survive on their specialty technology and one or two high flying products. The rest is just 'filler material'.An additional damper is the fact that devices are sold for the cost of the surface area. a power diode that is 1mm x 1mm of silicon sells for 0.5 $. A chip with 100.000 transistors and complex mixed signal circuitry that is 1mmx1mm also sells for 0.5 $ ... it just cost 100.000 times more to develop. why bother ?The semiconductor business has hit rock bottom ,apart from RAM, Flash ,cpu and smortphoney / tablety things.