With CES currently underway in Las Vegas, it might be time to consider how much of a gamble semiconductors will be in the coming year. Some devices at the Consumer Electronics Show may have already factored into Mike Cowan’s statistical analysis while some may drive future sales. Whatever the partial pressures of the vaporware at CES, it’s useful to look at real IC revenues and use them to establish the market trends. That’s the value of the Cowan LRA Semiconductor Forecast.
January’s Cowan LRA forecasts based on the most current semiconductor sales data available (November) show steady strengthening for the industry. Actual November sales data were again stronger than predicted by the previous forecast. The positive variance was just over 18% which sounds promising.
Cowan uses the actual to forecast variance to track what he terms the Momentum Indicator or MI. The MI for the the latest forecast is below the previous month’s record high of nearly 27%. But a three month moving average shows steady improvement despite what tends to be an oscillation month to month.
Since bottoming out in December of 2008, the Momentum Indicator has provided an encouraging outlook. Even after getting back into positive territory, the MI has maintained a strong pace with the latest three month moving average sitting at around 20%.
Looking at Cowan’s forecasts for 2009 semiconductor sales against the actual numbers coming in from the WSTS, I expect the two to converge once the December figures are tallied. Right now, the Cowan LRA forecasts $222B for the year. The model predicts $236B for 2010
Click (and keep clicking to view more) on the graphic below to view an excerpt from the latest Cowan LRA forecast. There are six slides in total.
More about Mike Cowan
Mike Cowan, the developer of the Cowan LRA Model for forecasting global S/C sales, is a 44-year semiconductor industry veteran. He has a 36-year history at IBM's Microelectronics Division in East Fishkill, N.Y., where he was involved in many facets of semiconductor development and manufacturing engineering, including both technical and management responsibilities.
During his last ten years at IBM, as a senior technical staff member, he was involved in strategy development and competitor/competitive analysis focused on the semiconductor industry, and had developed a number of top-down and bottom-up models to predict the dynamics of the semiconductor industry.
Following his retirement from IBM in 2002 he became an independent semiconductor industry analyst providing his monthly forecasts to The Semiconductor Reporter website from 2002 to 2006, to Future Horizons during 2007 and 2008, and presently to various websites reporting on the “comings and goings” of the industry including EE Times’ Silicon Strategies, weSRCH.com, and the semiconDr.com blog.
Cowan earned both BS and MS degrees in physics at Wayne State University in Michigan, and an MS in electrical engineering at Syracuse University in New York.
For more information regarding the model or the presented results, you may contact Mike Cowan directly at: mikedcowan(at)verizon.net.
