Stephen Newberry
Analyst · Mehdi Hosseini from Susquehanna International
Well, to the extent that I can understand your question, I think, at the end of the day, all spending has to be looked at in terms of what's the demand environment that is present for NAND, present for DRAM, present for Advanced Logic, what customer is ramping on what technology node and what's the capital intensity for that. And when you look at supply and demand numbers relative to NAND, they're very much in balance. When you look at where the NAND companies are relative to cost and the pricing, they're making money. When you look at DRAM, it's probably running a little bit below, the normal cost curve. There's probably a little bit of excess demand in the pipeline for DRAM, which is why I think you see that there is some slowing down of how much more conversions and capital is going into DRAM. When you look at Foundry, as I commented, I think, they're doing fine relative to the targeted rate of yield improvement on the leading edge. But let's not confuse that with the yields at 65 and the yields at 40, 45 are higher than the yields today at 28. And so, a company has to be careful not to take too much demand relative to what it costs to output that demand. And so while yields are still coming up as a function of the learning curve, you want to keep your investments in capacity expansion in sync with a reasonable demand that you can meet, because if you take on too much demand and you make too many commitments and your yields are running low, you have to offset that by putting a lot more equipment in, and the cost doesn't change even though your output is reduced. So I think, when we look at the demand environment, when we look at capital intensity, I think we're in a period where the customers are kind of consolidating their gains. They're adjusting very rapidly, which they can to kind of align how quickly they bring capacity on relative to demand, and therefore, accounts for demand. And like I said, I think, we've got volatility in the near term, but I don't think that it fundamentally is changing the trend of what the investment levels are that are going to have to be made to deal with 10% to 11% average IC unit growth over the next 2, 3, 4 years.