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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 287.0/March 16,
2007
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / Burger: An IKAN Double
- Friday Feature / Gilder: Politically Correct Science
- Friday Blogger Bonus / Top 25 Chip Firms
- Readings /
SPECIAL
OFFER
|
The Telecosm
Lounge |
The
Week /
An IKAN Double
Charlie Burger (March 2007 Gilder Technology Report excerpt):
It’s hard to get excited about a business that ousted its visionary founder and
fired 10% of its engineers (shortly before Christmas) while revenue and margins
were freefalling into a market that is beginning to sprout serious competitors.
But maybe we should stir ourselves at least a little, because at its current
valuation, Ikanos (IKAN) stands a realistic chance of doubling its
market cap even if it does nothing but rise with the broadband tide.
Minus
sales contributed by the Fusiv line of home gateway silicon acquired early last
year from Analog Devices, Ikanos’s revenue shrank from about $30m in the first
quarter of 2006 to under $15m in the fourth quarter, when the access or carrier
side of the business descended to a level not seen in almost two years. Over
the same period, gross margin dropped from the mid-50s to near 40%, where
management is hoping to cling for a while before ascending to their lowered
long-term goal of 45%. Helping to fend of a complete disaster was Fusiv, which
added some $40m to last year’s revenue.
Some
of Ikanos’s price and margin woes have come from increasing sales into the
gateway market, where competition is hotter. However, some pressure is surely
coming from competitive stirrings on the carrier access side, where the
company’s flagship VDSL2 silicon had until recently been the lonely entrant….
Find
out why Ikanos believes it will win a majority of the VDSL2 deployments this
year by logging
in with your subscriber ID at http://www.gildertech.com/ to read the
complete March report.
|
Gilder’s
latest GAINS |
Friday Feature / Politically Correct
Science
Gilder Technology Report Subscriber (3/9/07): George,
please weigh in on Gore and global warming.
George Gilder (3/10/07): The disabling flaw of the Al Gore movie is that
nearly all the details (Kilamanjaro, the Chad
lake, the spread of diseases and on and on) dissolve as soon as you investigate
them. (It’s been colder than usual on Kil; the lake is a few feet deep and
disappears cyclically; the diseases are unrelated to GW.)
The key to his scientific argument is the famous Academy Award
extrapolation of CO2 increases to the skies, as dramatized by his elevator lift
scene.
But far from an exponential, CO2 does not even have anywhere near a linear
impact on temperatures. If he compared the increase in CO2 not to existing CO2
but to the gyrations of other greenhouse gasses, particularly water vapor,
which is 130 times more voluminous, he would have had to crawl along the bottom
of the chart with a magnifying glass.
The idea that CO2, which is absorbed by plants and sustains them (to the
extent of a 28% increase in foliage in recent years), is a pollutant of any
kind will be regarded by future scientists as the looniest notion of our
increasingly innumerate media culture. Nick Tredennick did a great short essay
on this. (See http://blog.gildertech.com/index.php?/archives/13-Aliens-Global-Warming.html)
As Richard Feynman pointed out about adjectival "sciences,"
environmental science probably isn't. It's science for rich upper class dummies
like Bobby Kennedy and Sharon Rockefeller who think they should be able to push
around current wealth creators because their own wealth is "well
seasoned" by time and refined by Ivy "liberal arts." They
themselves are intellectual pigmies compared to their forbears in business whom
they depend on for their trust fund support and disdain in politically correct
fatuities.
To read more posts by George Gilder and the GTR subscribers log on
with your subscriber ID at http://www.gildertech.com/board/.
____________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / Top 25 Chip
Firms
Dylan
McGrath (EE Times, 3/14/07): It was the "haves" versus the
"have-nots" for top 25 IC suppliers in 2006, according to market
research firm IC Insights Inc., which said Wednesday (March 14) that six of
last year's top 25 chip firms saw revenue growth of better than 35 percent
while nearly one-third experienced below average growth of less than 9 percent.
The
strength in the DRAM market, which increased 32 percent in 2006, spurred a
surge in sales at Hynix Semiconductor Inc., Qimonda AG and Elpida Memory Inc.,
according to IC Insights (Scottsdale, Ariz.). Sony Corp., meanwhile, saw its
2006 semiconductor sales surge 37 percent thanks largely to internal transfer
revenue from the company's Playstation 3 game console, the firm said.
Advanced
Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) saw its chip revenue jump 44 percent due largely to a
noticeable market share increase, IC Insights said. AMD's mid-year acquisitions
of graphics chip vendor ATI Technologies Inc. also played a role in the
company's revenue surge, IC Insights said. Still, AMD remains only about
one-sixth the size of archrival Intel Corp., IC Insights noted. The research
firm expects AMD to move into the top 10 IC suppliers in 2007 with a full year
of revenue from the former ATI business.
Broadcom
Corp. (Irvine, Calif.) saw its 2006 IC revenue increase 37 percent, according
to IC Insights, which credited the company's strong presence in the networking,
broadband and mobile and wireless product segments. Broadcom achieved a
whooping 31 percent annual average growth from 2001 to 2006, IC Insights noted.
Nine
of the top 25 chip suppliers in 2006 are headquartered in the U.S., according
to IC Insights. Eight of the top 25 are headquartered in Japan, the firm noted,
with four in Europe and two each in Taiwan and South Korea.
Who else made the top 25? Read on:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198001040
____________________________________
Readings /
Luxtera integrates photodetectors on SOI
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198001251
Chasing the China Fantasy
http://chasingthedragon.blogs.fortune.com/2007/03/16/have-americans-been-duped-by-an-elitist-china-fantasy/#more-15
AMD, Intel spar over small motherboards
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=KRTGDL13GBBHCQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=198001275
The Weekly GTI
http://www.gtindex.com/
Cisco to Pay $3.2 Billion for WebEx
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/C/CISCO_WEBEX?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Users Shatter Storage Myths
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=119627&WT.svl=news1_2
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FRIDAY LETTER STAFF
Editor: Mary Collins / mcollins@gilder.com
Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com
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