Michael J. Long
Analyst · Ananda Baruah representing Brean Murray
Yes, I think that -- the truth is everyone wants to grow, and you could probably negotiate anything you wanted right now on the growth aspect. But the fact, is there is just not the market to support it, especially if you think of that -- just take lead times as an example. They've declined to 12 weeks, so they're relatively normal to what we've seen in the marketplace. We've seen, as we can tell you now for a few quarters, seen the book to bill relatively flat; the backlog, relatively flat. And everybody's looking for a way to get out of it. What we're trying to do ourselves is just to expand the market that Arrow can go after, providing a bigger marketplace. And that, right now, is the work that we are doing and some of the work we are doing in the EAD space, to grow the markets. Now, if we can capture more of that, we'll increase a bigger part of the share. But in general, any time the market is down, our computer business partners will try to grow their sales that way. And in fact, we've seen some of that lead over to the semiconductor suppliers. But going back, the design win activity for the year is up about 11% year-over-year, relatively flat sequentially or minus 3%, which is relatively flattish, take the number of registrations. The indicators just aren't there. And remember the last downturn, what we saw during the cycle, which gave us the feeling that things were going to get better with it, that design cycle was at about 27% increase year-over-year. So we're not seeing that spike at all right now, which just tells us the next couple of quarters are still going to be tough.