News for Oct. 17, 2000
It would seem that the last downturn left some semiconductor and device manufacturers with litigious chips on their shoulders.
Take, for example, Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices. The rivals are still licking their wounds from the last price battle. And according to a Reuters report, Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, and Advanced Micro Devices are embroiled once again in a fierce price war on microprocessors, dulling demand, particularly in Europe and in the U.S. corporate market.
To make the situation even more difficult, the International Trade Commission (ITC) has been busy reviewing alleged patent infringement, which in some cases takes years to settle. This week, after four years, the ITC found, among other things, that San Jose, CA-based Atmel Corp.'s U.S. Patent No. 4,451,903 is valid, enforceable and was infringed by Silicon Storage Technologies, Inc., Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. and Winbond Electronics Corp. of Taiwan as well as Winbond Electronics North America Corp of California.
The price war and the petering demand, however, come at an especially bad time for Intel, which is spending $6 billion this year on capital projects such as new chip plants, up 71 percent from last year. Intel also faces stiffening competition from AMD, the increasingly feisty chipmaker that for the first time has a chip as powerful, if not more so, than Intel.
Intel's stock price has been sliced in half during the past six weeks and suffered again on Monday. The shares fell $4-11/16, or 12 10 percent, to $35-11/16 on the Nasdaq, where it was the most actively traded stock by a wide margin at 92 million shares. AMD stock tumbled $1-7/16 or 6.6 percent, to $20-3/8 in New York Stock Exchange trading.
The biggest problem Intel has is they have much greater competition than they were used to dealing with; execution issues that were in part brought on by increased competition; and you've got the PC market, which is stagnant at best,'' said chip analyst Drew Peck at SG Cowen & Co., who predicted the price war six months ago. “You could see this one coming.''
“The problem is right now there are absolutely no signs of pickup coming out of Europe now; Europe's an absolute disaster,'' said analyst Dan Niles at Lehman Bros. “But that portion of the globe consumes 25 percent of all semiconductors, so the question is how do you deal with that?''
Market flux
Even more significantly, analysts agree, that the woes of Intel and Advanced point to the diversification of the chip industry, a trend that has been underway for some time amid the rapid growth of the Internet and proliferation of wireless phones.
No longer is the industry a monolithic beast whose health can be judged by looking at Intel and Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software company whose Windows operating system runs more than 80 percent of the world's PCs. In Intel's case, its chips are found in more than 80 percent of world PCs.
“The problem is right now there are absolutely no signs of pickup coming out of Europe now; Europe's an absolute disaster,'' said analyst Dan Niles at Lehman Bros. “But that portion of the globe consumes 25 percent of all semiconductors, so the question is how do you deal with that?'' Smaller companies, like Atmel, all vie and staunchly protect their respective pieces of the pie, fuelling allegations of infringement.
According to the ITC, Silicon Storage, Sanyo and Winbond infringed on Atmel's semiconductor device patent, violating section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. In addition, the ITC handed down a limited exclusion order prohibiting “unlicensed entry for consumption of infringing EPROM's, EEPROM's, FLASH Memories, and FLASH microcontroller semiconductor devices, and circuit boards containing such devices.”
Further, the ITC determined that the infringing devices and circuit boards containing such devices are excluded from entry into the United States may only enter the U.S. only under a bond of $0.78 per device during the requisite 60-day review period.
According to Julie Mar-Spinola, Atmel's Director of Litigation and Intellectual Property Counsel, “This is the result we have been seeking from the ITC for nearly four years,” says Julie Mar-Spinola, Atmel's director of litigation and intellectual property counsel. “Not only does the decision confirm Atmel's unwavering belief that its patent was violated by these companies, but it also reaffirms the strength and value of our patent portfolio.”
At the time of this report, Intel reported profits 41 cents a share, beating lowered expectations.