Einverstanden, bis auf die Tatsache, daß man keineswegs jetzt den Zinssenkungen
wie die Mana vom Himmel loben muß.
Intel: als erstes wäre da die tatsache, daß sich Intel aus dem Geschäft, der DDR-Ram Subventionierung, bei Kauf eines Intel Pentium Prozessors zurückzieht.
Intel zahlte eine Subvention für diese Speicherart von etwa 60$. (für 128 MB)
Um Cisco und Co. ist es weiterhin fundamental schlecht bestellt. (Der Ausbau
der Infrastruktur in USA durfte genauso abgenommen haben, wie auch der Export
in andere Länder). Der Grund ist der starke Dollar. Ich gehe erst dann davon aus, daß die US Wirtschaft sich deutlicht erholen wird, wenn die Anschaffung von diesem komischen etwas aus USA:) (ob es tatsächlich Produkte sind, darüber läßt sich ja bekanntlich streiten). Erst muß der Dollar wieder mindestens dorthin zurückfallen, wo er hingehört.).
Erst dann ist davon auszugehen daß US Exporte wieder zunehmen, in der Gegenwart
durften sie eigentlich eingebrochen sein.
Was unterm Strich bleibt: um die schwachen Unternehmen, durfte es in der Zukunft noch wesentlich schlechter bestellt sein, wie früher, die meisten von diesen angesprochenen 500 sind im gewissen Sinne bereits irgendetwas mit 11.
Aber noch nicht ganz Konkurs (deswegen Irgendetwas).
Die aktuelle Erholung an den Aktienmärkten, ist aus meiner Sicht nichts weiter
als ein Ergebnis der Anlegerpsyche. Die Aktien sind schon so tief unten, daß man keineswegs vermutet, daß es noch tiefer gehen kann.
Und wir haben hier mit der Masse zu tun.
Ich gehe daher eigentlich mehr zwar von einer Fortsetzung der Raylle, wenn nicht schon vorbei, und dann doch noch von einem Einbruch aus.
Am Ende des Jahres wissen wir dann vermutlich genauer, wie stark, oder auch wie schwach die US Wirtschaft tatsächlich geworden ist.
Im Moment haben wir immer noch mit Gewinnwarnungen zu tun. Größere Insolvenzen sind eigentlich noch nicht gekommen, doch dies durfte der nächste Schritt sein.
Ob da die großen Unternehmen für tatsächliche Marktbewegungen nach oben sorgen können möchte ich milde ausgedrückt verneinen.
Dennoch gebe ich dem Markt doch noch eine Erholung zubilligen, aber 5000 Punkte an der Nasdaq halte ich eigentlich für unmöglich. 3000 kann es aber durchaus werden, doch auch ob diese kommen ist derzeit auch eher fraglich.
[b]Jedenfalls hat die Zinssenkungreihe von Greenspan nichts weiter - real gesehen - bewirkt, als erhöhte Vola an den Märkten. Herr Greenspan pustete
Phantasie in die Aktienmärkte hinein. Sicherlich, paar Unternehmen die vor
Kurzem noch bittere Rückschläge hinnehmen mußten werden nicht so schnell
insolvent, wenn man gerade Intel anschaut. Im Gegenteil: Intel hat eigentlich
den Konkurrenzdruck zu spüren bekommen, gerade im Moment, wo die Zyklik bei den
Halbleiterwerten am Tiefpunkt angelangt ist. Verantwortlich für Gewinnwarnungen bei Intel ist nicht etwa schlechte Marktsituation, sondern der Konkurrent AMD, und das wird so lange weitergehen, bis Intel mit wesentlich schnelleren Prozessoren an den Markt kommt. Ob der Markt jedoch wohlwollend den 3000 DM
teueren künftigen Pentium V, oder gar VI so schnell aus dem Laden holt, ist bei heutigen Anforderungen der Software an die Hardware, eher zu verneinen.
Und in diesem Markt dominiert nun mal der Billigchip Celeron vor Pentium III,
und wenn man die Wahl hat einen Celeron zu kaufen, dann greift man dann doch
lieber zu AMD Wundertüte, die die Hälfte kostet, aber selbst den Pentium III
dann doch in den Schatten stellt, wenn man es richtig anstellt.
Viel erwarte ich derzeit von Intel nicht. Intel hat Prognosen gesenkt, und die wird die Firma vermutlich erfüllen. Ob da ja noch Platz für Jubel ist, kann
man eigentlich getrost verneinen. Diese Firma wird aber vermutlich die Flüsterschätzungen des IV Quartals 2001 und I Quartals 2002 deutlich übertreffen. AMD vermutlich genauso. (Das Weihnachtsgeschäft 2000 war ja
bekanntlich keins). Irgendwann werden die Leute aufrüsten wollen.
Zum Schluß scherzweise:
ich würde die Zinssenkungen der FED nicht als agressiv, sondern panikartig bezeichnen. Agressiv wäre, wenn es gleich Dausend Punkte gewesen wären.
Eigentlich wollte die FED auch keine Zinsen senken, sie wollte die US Wirtschaft
zu einem Soft Landing verleiten. Jetzt, damit die Räder dann doch nicht mit vollem Schwung auf die Piste hauen, müssen die Boys radikal das Ruder umdrehen,
aber ich habe noch nicht gehört, daß man aus einem Flugzeug Rakete machen kann.
Exakt das wird aber versucht zu erreichen. Na ja.
Da gab es in USA schon mal eine Rakete, die trotz Vollgas den Rückwärtsgang einlegte. Auch das wollte ja keiner.
Gruß
>Gewinnwarnungen in USA
>Die Welle der Gewinnwarnungen für das 2. Quartal in Amerika bricht gerade über die Anleger herein. Bei näherer Betrachtung hat sie jedoch eine andere Qualität als die Welle der Gewinnwarnungen für das 1. Quartal, woraus sich interessante Schlüsse für die weitere Entwicklung ziehen lassen. Bisher haben 533 Unternehmen Gewinnwarnungen ausgesprochen für das 2. Quartal, während es um die selbe Zeit im Vorquartal erst 438 waren. Positive Ergebnisse haben 109 Unternehmen für das 2. Quartal in Aussicht gestellt, was wesentlich mehr ist, als für die gerade eben 75 aus dem 1. Quartal.
>Die aggressiven Zinssenkungen der Federal Reserve zeigen offensichtlich Wirkung. Wir müssen uns darauf einstellen, daß im 2. Quartal zahlenmäßig noch mehr Gewinnwarnungen kommen als im 1. Quartal, bei näherer Betrachtung sehen wir aber einen großen Unterschied. Die schlechten Nachrichten kommen nicht von großen Unternehmen wie Cisco, Home Depot und Intel, die im 1. Quartal einen sehr negativen Einfluß auf den Markt hatten. Im 2. Quartal kommen, mit Ausnahme von Sun Microsystems, die Gewinnwarnungen von kleinen und mittelgroßen Gesellschaften, die einen wesentlich geringeren Einfluß auf den Gesamtmarkt haben. Die Gewinnwarnungen der großen Unternehmen, mit Ausnahme von Sun Microsystems, scheinen damit hinter uns zu liegen.
>Zur selben Zeit ist die Bodenbildung, die am 4. April diesen Jahres begann, jetzt genau 2 Monate alt und hat damit eine sehr hohe Stabilität und bringt einen guten Ausgangspunkt für weitere Kursanstiege in den nächsten Monaten.
>Dr. Georg Thilenius
>08.06.2001
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Die großen Marktführer haben sich auf den allgemeinen Rückgang der Nachfrage eingestellt und versuchen mittels Preiskrieg die Marktanteile zu vergrößern.
Durch allgemeine Rationalisierungen haben sie jetzt im 2.Quartal weniger Kosten als im ersten.
Nun können, da ihre Erwartungen gekürzt sind können sie dadurch sogar positiver überraschen, denn sie haben den Teil vom Kuchen, der den kleinen und mittelständigen Unternehmen fehlt.
Hier ein sehr gutes Beispiel von Dell:
June 8, 2001
Dell Fine-Tunes Its PC Pricing
To Gain an Edge in Slow Market
By Gary McWilliams
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Is Dell Computer Corp. fighting a price war with itself?
One day recently, the Dell Latitude L400 ultralight laptop was listed at $2,307 on the company's Web page catering to small businesses. On the Web page for sales to health-care companies, the same machine was listed at $2,228, or 3% less. For state and local governments, it was priced at $2,072.04, or 10% less than the price for small businesses.
The price differences are no mistake. Amid a slowdown that is crunching its own profits, the world's No. 1 PC maker is employing ferocious high-tech tactics to grab an ever-larger share of the PC market. The Austin, Texas, company's more than 5,000 salespeople constantly quiz large corporate customers on their purchase plans -- and on the deals they are weighing with Dell rivals. And the company has begun demanding flexible pricing in its contracts with suppliers, many of which also continually update Dell on their own costs. All that lets Dell adjust prices and incentives immediately in response to changes in its own costs and demand from customers, from one segment of the PC market to another.
"Our flexibility allows us to be [priced] different even within a day," says a Dell spokesman. A Dell telephone-sales representative recently quoted a machine for $50 less than the price touted in an advertisement in the New York Times the same day.
Commodity Prices
Dell's strategy is collapsing profit margins throughout the PC market, a dire development for rivals who can't keep up. Dell is pricing its machines not so much like lucrative high-tech products, but more like airline tickets and other low-margin commodities. That puts pressure on Dell to push up sales volume to compensate for the thinner margins.
Dell's tough pricing could force slower-moving rivals to retrench."There will be consolidation -- and I do not expect it from mergers," says Barry Jaruzelski, head of the U.S. computer and electronics practice at consultants Booz Allen & Hamilton."A large player could be driven out."
For Dell, the strategy is paying off. In the first quarter of 2001, shipments of personal computers world-wide grew by 852,000 units, to 31.6 million, while Dell's shipments alone grew by 957,000 units. Dell's unit sales grew by more than the overall industry's because the company snatched market share from competitors during the period. In the U.S., Dell now accounts for nearly a quarter of PC sales, compared with 6.8% in 1996, according to International Data Corp.
With PC unit sales expected to rise just 5.8% this year, compared with average annual gains of 15% in recent years, the industry is already feeling the pinch. Compaq Computer Corp. has said it will take a $450 million write-down in the second quarter for unsold PCs, while Hewlett-Packard Co. wrote down $100 million in the quarter ended April 30 for overpriced inventory.
Visions of Wal-Mart
Dell, too, is taking a hit. Its net margin has slipped nearly two percentage points in recent months to less than 6% of sales. And some analysts worry that the company's aggressive pricing could eventually reduce the margin to 3.5% -- a slice only slightly better than that of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., another well-known cost hawk and price cutter.
Still, among the top six U.S. PC makers, Dell was the only one to report a profit for the first quarter. In the current fiscal year, ending Feb. 1, 2002, Dell's profit will decline for the first time since 1993, according to a survey of Wall Street analysts by Thomson Financial/First Call. Earnings last year totaled $2.31 billion. In 4 p.m. Nasdaq Stock Market trading Thursday, Dell stock was at $25.61, down 53% from its 52-week high of $54.67, reached in July last year.
Dell's tactics build on founder and CEO Michael S. Dell's famously fastidious concern with costs and pricing. At company and industry gatherings, the 36-year-old billionaire tirelessly quizzes customers on what they would be willing to pay for new technologies. He once chastised a supplier for bringing cinnamon rolls to a meeting with Dell employees."Michael walked in and said, 'Take those back and let's knock the price off the next shipment of materials you bring in,'" recalls Jim Cano, a now-retired Dell manufacturing executive who attended the meeting." 'We don't need food. We want a better price.'"
Even before recent staff reductions, Dell's overhead consumed just 11.5 cents of every sales dollar, compared with 16 cents at Gateway Inc., 21 cents at Compaq and 22.5 cents at Hewlett-Packard. And as it grew into the world's biggest PC maker, Dell made a practice of quickly passing along to customers its own savings from price drops in memory chips, disk drives, modems and other key PC components.
For years, most PC makers have calculated unit costs -- and thus margins -- by projecting sales, then asking suppliers to submit component bids based on those sales estimates. The PC maker then sets a list price based on the bid costs, its own sales projections and its desired markup. Production is based on projections; the system leaves scant wiggle room for subsequent changes in component costs, customer demand, or others' price cuts. Moreover, prices are very often in the hands of independent PC dealers, free to add their own markups -- a system that gave manufacturers little control over the final retail price.
In Close Touch
Dell's methods have always differed. It builds its machines to order and shuns sales through independent dealers. By selling directly via the Internet, catalogs and the telephone, it maintains direct contact with customers and can regularly gauge their sensitivity to price changes. It also routinely polls customers on their willingness to pay for new technologies, such as whether they would substitute flat-panel displays for bulkier monitors.
More recently, suppliers and others close to Dell say, the company has developed a cost-forecasting system that underpins its fluid pricing. The company won't discuss in detail how it sets prices, beyond saying that its strategy has cut into its rivals' business."Contrary to what most companies say, it's not necessary to be price competitive," says James T. Vanderslice, Dell's co-president."It's most necessary to be cost-competitive."
The company's 25 main suppliers and dozens of others provide regular updates on their costs and prices, enabling Dell to forecast prices for each component in its computers several months into the future. Last year, the company set up Internet"portals" for many of its suppliers so that it could share with them regular updates on its own inventories and customer purchases. All this pooling of information provides early warnings of potential material shortages and helps Dell and its suppliers schedule production to avoid overproduction or costly overtime runs.
"They feed forecast changes to me on a weekly basis," said Gil Christie, vice president of operations at video-graphics maker ATI Technologies Inc., Thornhill, Ontario. Mr. Christie says that of all the PC companies that ATI sells to,"they are the only one I'm dealing with that have it." Dell's weekly purchasing forecasts, he says, help ATI plan its own production and purchasing more precisely, which holds down costs.
Suppliers say Dell makes it clear that it expects them to push down prices just as hard as it does."There isn't a standard fixed price" with Dell, says Andrew G. Gort, senior vice president at computer-board maker Celestica Inc."They change their price to a customer, and we're expected to participate in that," he says.
That gives Dell an edge now, as prices of circuit boards, flat-panel displays, microprocessors and other major PC components are falling. Dynamic random-access-memory chips, or DRAMs, have plummeted to $2 each for a standard 64-megabit chip from $8.65 apiece last August.
Information collected from suppliers and Dell's own factories is grouped into a spreadsheet called a"cost package" that sales managers use to find out precisely what each product costs Dell to make now and to project what it will cost six months into the future. The company now aims to go beyond collaborative planning with suppliers to collaborative design, using the Internet to swap information among its own and suppliers' engineers.
The cost package is available online to all Dell business managers, who set profit goals for all their accounts. The team that collects the information also sends e-mail alerts when costs move unexpectedly. After a late 1999 jump in memory-chip prices hurt profits on sales under existing fixed-price contracts, Dell renegotiated many contracts to incorporate the unexpected increases.
With open access to cost information, Dell sales representatives can adjust PC prices based on quantity, profit targets and proposed delivery dates. Dell also considers the degrees of competition among computer buyers, so that even on the same day, the company may sell PCs at one price to governments, at another to health-care companies, and so on.
The company's salespeople encourage customers to order far in advance or seek staggered delivery dates. In addition to giving Dell a reliable backlog, these long-term sales allow Dell to squeeze higher profits out of lower prices charged now for deliveries in the future -- for instance, when the company predicts that the price of an Intel Corp. microprocessor is scheduled to decline 10% in several months.
A Dell salesman says he can"set the margin wherever I want as long as it meets the objectives of the regional sales manager." For prices below the target margin, a salesperson can call a"special pricing" team that will evaluate the lower price and provide an answer within an hour.
Dell customers say rapidly changing prices have become a necessary part of the market."If you go to Dell from two or three directions, you get two or three different prices," says William McCallum, chief executive officer of Integration Concepts Inc., a Hurst, Texas, provider of computer services to health-care companies. But he says the company buys Dell machines because the price is right.
David Krauthamer, computer manager at Advanced Fibre Communications Inc., in Petaluma, Calif., recently switched his PC purchases to Dell from Compaq because of lower prices."It's a brave new world when people give you their cost and say, 'This is our markup,'" he says.
Peter Panagiotatos, a computer manager at Nova Chemical Inc.'s Pittsburgh office, says he recently bought 700 Dell desktop PCs at 40% off their nominal list price. Nova already had a negotiated discount but found that Dell readily clipped an additional 25% off that when he made the purchase.
Big rivals have embraced to a limited degree Dell's build-to-order assembly and its distribution method, but they still haven't been able to match its pricing. They still tend to follow a system of estimating sales, then drafting a production plan and negotiating long-term component purchases, and the bulk of their sales are still through dealers, with whom they don't share cost information.
Solutions Abroad
IBM and Compaq say they have begun investigating software that will allow them to adjust their own prices according to demand for certain machines. And some have begun shifting more production to lower-cost overseas sites. Compaq's new PCs for businesses are built entirely by Asian subcontractors, a break from the U.S. company's norm.
At home-PC maker Gateway, Michael J. Ritter, vice president of product marketing, says Dell's price shifts are"keeping people like me on their toes." In response, Gateway just offered to match the price of any comparable Dell PC. It also created a database system to monitor rivals' prices.
Clark Hubbard, president of CSI Data Systems Inc., a Norcross, Ga., computer dealer, says Compaq, IBM and Hewlett-Packard tell him to match any Dell quote, regardless of their costs."They'll do anything, anything they can, if it's within reason to keep Dell from getting the deal," he says.
Smaller PC makers can't keep up. Already this year, Micron Electronics Inc. has opted to exit from the business and focus on an Internet service business. EMachines Inc., once the largest retail-store PC maker, earlier this month said it is considering a sale of the company.
Dell, meanwhile, remains as aggressive as ever. On May 7, the company said it will take a restructuring charge of as much as $350 million for the fiscal second quarter, ending Aug. 3, to consolidate operations and slash staff by 10%. It said it will use the savings to underpin price cuts.
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INTC hat viel größere Kapazitäten und ein breiteres Geschäftsfeld.
Ob AMD genau so schnell neue Technologien entwickeln kann, läßt sich bezweifeln.
Hier eine News zu INTC
Sunday June 10 08:30 AM EDT
Intel Makes an Ultra-Tiny Chip
By JOHN MARKOFF The New York Times
Researchers at Intel, using conventional chip-making equipment, have made transistors that are just 80 atoms wide.
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Computer researchers have fashioned infinitesimally tiny electronic switches using conventional chipmaking equipment, demonstrating that the semiconductor industry will be able to continue shrinking its basic building blocks at a torrid pace at least until the end of this decade.
At a technical conference being held this weekend in Kyoto, Japan, a scientist for the Intel Corporation (NasdaqNM:INTC - news) reported that the company had successfully made a handful of silicon transistors no more than 70 to 80 atoms wide and 3 atoms thick. They are capable of switching on and off 1.5 trillion times a second, making them the world's fastest silicon transistor.
Although the Lilliputian switches do not represent the smallest experimental transistors yet invented, they are being hailed by the industry as a watershed because they were made using standard commercial techniques and the same materials used in today's microprocessors and memory chips.
The achievement indicates that researchers have once again found a way around technical barriers that might have slowed or stopped the phenomenal four-decade march that has led to the speed and power of today's computers.
"This is a very good piece of technical work," said Hon-Sum Philip Wong, an I.B.M. research scientist who presented a similar paper in Japan this weekend focusing on related technical problems in building transistors three generations in the future.
Although semiconductor engineers can now predict with great accuracy the amount of computing power that the transistor advance will bring with it by 2007, computer scientists cautioned that speculating about labor-saving applications or dazzling technological consequences can be more risky.
While the semiconductor manufacturing process underlying the modern microchip continues to improve steadily, specific new applications are frequently unpredictable. Some of the most prominent advances of recent years for example the electronic wristwatch, the personal computer and the Internet all largely came as surprises to experts.
The research will make make possible computer processor chips with as many as one billion transistors and 20 gigahertz speeds. That is more than 23 times the number of transistors used in Intel's current state-of-the-art Pentium 4 microprocessor, which has 42 million transistors and is capable of executing 1.7 billion instructions a second.
It will also make possible a generation of fingernail-sized memory chips that can each store four billion bits of data more than 333 copies of"Moby Dick."
Industry researchers said that shrinking the transistor size was a technical tour de force.
"It proves that Intel is a technical heavyweight," said G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research, a semiconductor industry research firm based in San Jose, Calif."What Intel does so well is take a technology that is not meant to be extendable and pushing it past its limits, making computing incredibly cost-effective."
Moreover, the new chips will consume less than one volt of electricity perhaps less than half of today's Intel microprocessors making it likely that within half a decade the world's fastest processors will be portable and perhaps even hand- held.
Significantly, in an era when vast farms of Internet and World Wide Web servers are being blamed for a share of the nation's electrical power crunch, the Intel scientists reported that the power consumption of each new generation of chips is shrinking more quickly than the computer power is increasing.
Indeed, the dwindling power requirement of the Intel transistors represents one of the fortunate paradoxes of silicon-based computing: these transistors are able to switch on and off more than three times faster than today's microprocessors while consuming only slightly more than half as much electricity.
The Intel technical paper, which was presented this weekend at the Silicon Nano Electronics Workshop in Japan, comes as good news for an industry that in the last two years has been experiencing self-doubt about the longevity of its guiding principle, known as Moore's Law.
First noted by the Intel pioneer and cofounder Gordon E. Moore in 1965, the rule has held that the number of transistors that can be etched on a single chip of silicon doubles on average every 18 months.
But engineers and physicists note there is nothing technically or physically inevitable in the continued shrinking of the fundamental size of electronic circuitry. Indeed, as long ago as 1993, Dr. Moore himself publicly voiced his doubts about the permanence of the progression that received his name. In a speech given in Silicon Valley that year, he suggested that a process known as 0.25 micron might be the point at which the industry ran into fundamental physical limits. A micron is a millionth of a meter.
Nevertheless, chip makers blew past the 0.25-micron size two generations of chips ago roughly four years and now use exotic optical techniques to manufacture the most advanced processors and memory chips, which are based on transistors with 0.13-micron technology.
Now Intel scientists are saying that they can see their way at least three more generations into the future, to transistors with a 0.045-micron technology less than one-fifth the size limit that Dr. Moore speculated about.
"Everyone who predicts the end of Moore's Law has always been wrong," said Gerald Marcyk, Intel's director of components research technology manufacturing group in Hillsboro, Ore.
The new results are a dramatic contrast to a pessimistic article written by another Intel researcher two years ago in the journal Science.
The Intel scientist, Paul A. Packan, wrote that it was not clear whether the most common type of silicon transistor could be scaled down beyond the 0.13-micron generation of chips that began to appear last year, because semiconductor engineers had not found ways around basic physical limits.
Now that those potential physical limits have been surmounted, the researchers acknowledged they are in a realm where the switches are so small that arcane physical effects such as the quantum behavior of electrons become a factor, making chip-building as much an art as a science.
The Intel scientists performed some"heroic efforts" to make a handful of transistors work, Dr. Marcyk said, adding that the specific methods used were Intel manufacturing trade secrets.
One of the principal challenges in creating these kinds of switches is that their smallest dimensions are much smaller than the wavelengths of light generated by the machines that etch patterns on silicon wafers.
In conventional lithography, a mask is used with transparent areas and opaque areas, like a photographic negative. However, the light passing through the transparent areas bends slightly, leaving a slightly blurry image. As circuits shrink below the width of a lightwave, this becomes a profound problem.
However, engineers have found a way to turn that manufacturing defect into a remarkably precise tool through a process called"phase shifting," which makes use of interfering patterns of light to create ultrafine circuit lines.
The semiconductor industry's technical road map has generally forecast that integrated circuits will stay on their doubling path until 2014. But doubters have continued to emerge, suggesting either that there will be insurmountable technical obstacles or that at some point the cost of each new generation of semiconductor factory will soar astronomically.
The Intel researchers said they had been faced with another challenge besides building ever tinier chips. Dr. Marcyk said that each time he presented his results to Andrew S. Grove, Intel's chairman and co-founder, Dr. Grove insisted,"I want you to show me the limit."
"I have to tell him, `Andy, I haven't found the limit yet,'" he said.
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