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SEMI gets Friday the 13th egg on its face |
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Apr 13, 2007 at 11:34 AM |
SEMI's book-to-bill ratio has been a reliable market statistic in the semiconductor equipment business for years, measuring the comparative flow of orders and sales.
Here's the rule of thumb: more tools booked than billed, good thing; more billed than booked, not so good. So when a press release hit the wires earlier today---yes, today, Friday the 13th---that the numbers from January and February were a tad off---actually more than a tad---that's not so good.
Blaming the snafu on "a data input error discovered in a review of the February book-to-bill report," that month's billings dropped nearly $130 million (to about $1.43 billion) and the bookings amount fell almost $252 million (to $1.4 billion), pushing the ratio down to a subparity level of .98---a huge swing from the bogus original book-to-bill of 1.5.
January's numbers took a bit more of a hit on the billings side---going down $156.5 million (to $1.45 billion)---but dropped a bit less on the bookings side compared with February---falling $229 million (to a total of $1.446 billion), resulting in a parity ratio of 1.0 (down from a erroneous 1.4).
We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars here, so the mistakes resulting from that "data input error" are not insignificant. The original numbers were hailed as a sign of a healthy equipment sector, but now that it turns out things weren't quite so rosy the first two months of the year, perceptions once positive may now turn gloomier. The bull has fled, and the bear is in the room.
The timing of the PR---hitting my inbox at a little after 10 a.m. Pacific time---is a bit suspicious, since it is traditional to try and bury bad news on a Friday. Yes, the U.S. press is still awake and working (or at least awake), but the Europeans are likely celebrating their Friday night and the Asians are asleep or just waking up...on Saturday morning.
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