Could the global semiconductor industry be heading for a much anticipated recovery? It’s starting to look that way. Chip sales rose in July for the fifth consecutive month on a month-to-month basis, according to the trade group, Semiconductor Industry Association. Which is not to say sales are robust; down 18.2 percent year-over-year, they’re abysmal, but they are showing continuing signs of recovery.
Not two months into 2009 and already the year is turning out to be the weakest the industry has seen in some time. With the economic downturn slowing growth in developing markets, consumers delaying cellphone purchases and retailers destocking them, cellphone juggernaut Nokia is scaling back production at its key Salo plant in Finland.
Dell, the second-rate PC company, may soon become a second-rate handset company as well. Anonymous sources tell The Wall Street Journal that the company has developed prototype smartphones that work on Windows Mobile and Google’s Android operating system. The first is said to boast a touchscreen similar to Apple’s iPhone, the other a slide-out QWERTY keypad like the Palm Pre–both intended to compete in the segment dominated by the iPhone and BlackBerry devices. According to the Journal, Dell may uncrate one or the other, or both, as early as February.
Well this should do wonders for Motorola employee morale…. The handset maker this morning said it will cut compensation and benefits packages for its employees in order to “better align with industry norms”–industry norms in Motorola’s case being the ongoing collapse of its post-Razr phone business.
Nokia’s Capital Markets Day event is proving quite the downer, and the day’s only just begun. This morning the company cut its global handset market forecast for the second time in three weeks, warning that the slowdown in the industry is worse than expected.
Wonderful news. The recession’s impact on the tech sector will not be nearly as pronounced as its predecessor’s, which turned Webvan’s refrigerated Freightliner trucks into hipster moving vans and made the Pets.com mascot piddle itself into oblivion like a submissive puppy. That’s the word from Forrester Research CEO George Colony, who believes the current downturn will be far kinder to tech than the one that heralded The Great Dark Time of 2001-2003.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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