Inventory: Loose or Tight? Equipment Shortages.

G. Dan Hutcheson

The Chip Insider®

Inventory: Loose or Tight? We were recently asked about the TCI Graphics IC Inventory data, after the WSJ published comments from the US Department of Commerce that their surveys show as little as 5 days lead times on chips. The main difference is that the DOC survey was just for a limited number of chips in short supply versus TechInsights' data, which are totals for the industry as a whole, and has as one of its triangulation vectors the quarterly inventories reported by public companies. You won't find any companies out there reporting just 5 days of inventories. But in reality, there is more to worry about...

Shortage Limits Equipment Growth: It's become pretty clear that shortages in the economy are more than just chips and are limiting more than auto manufacturing. Chip insiders first started to talk openly about it in the supply back in the early fall. Then we began to notice it in missed sales. Now it's being talked about openly on the financial news networks ever since Lam mentioned they missed on revenues due to shortages. Lam has arguably the most respected supply chain management group in the industry, so the effects have quickly rippled through the stock markets... I've done a quick modeling of the shortage effect. I come up with a miss more than a...