Articles

Sound/video card market update
Walter Rozovsky, NECX analyst, reports that the CD-ROM drive market is unstable and unusual. While there is no product available, customers are not willing to pay the extra money for them. He says that the prices have stabilized at $24-$26 for 32X - 40X brand name CD – ROMs. Prices are dropping in the DVD market, losing as much as $10 in the last month. Rozovsky says that the most common 12X – 16X DVD drives are going for $70.

"Creative Labs is the only brand name left and controlling the market they behave as a real monopoly," Rozovsky says. He reports that they have raised prices on their most popular cards and are introducing the PCI 128 Live Player 5.1, which provides the output for four speakers for surround sound.

The previously reported NVidia chipset storage is over, and Rozovsky reports that the prices of all the cards are going down, especially the high-end cards, where prices plummeted by as much as 20%.

CPU market update
As the scheduled price drop approaches, NECX analyst Beau Limbocker says that the CPU market is tight, especially the slot 1 processors. "What we will see ‘deals' on for the next few weeks will be Pentium III 750s and slower, as Intel has priced 800s at $190.00, in parity with the 750, 733, and 700."

Xeon 700 core speed high-cache processors with 1 meg and 2 meg cache memory on the roadmap are clocking in at $1175.00 and $1980.00, and the traffic is slower on the higher-priced 500 and 550s with the same bus speeds and cache memory, Limbocker says. "We have heard from several OEMs that Intel required ncnr purchase orders on all Xeons, which will eventually cause even more to show up from server manufacturers in the near future."

Limbocker also insists that Celerons are still hot, but the prices are not really that high. "Our movement of Celerons lately is higher than even during the release of the 433 and 466 months ago, with five thousand units being shipped per week on average, compared to less than half of that as recent as two weeks ago," he says. He also advises that the slower core speeds are trading for more money that the mainstream models.

Desktop drive market update
IDE market update
NECX analyst Dave Nebbia reports that the inventory is scarce and the pricing is high in this market. "Last week, we had some top tier OEMs come to the market with some major delivery problems," he says. Even though products are severely depleted, he says there is inventory in the 10gig Samsung product, 20gig 7200rpm product, and 30gig 5400rpm product, although it is expected to move quickly. He predicts a long fourth quarter, with low supply and high demand.

Notebook drives update
On the other hand, the market is slow in this area, although there is some demand on 10gigs and 20gigs. Nebbia predicts that the demand will continue to be low on the 6gig drives for the next month or so. "Notebook drives usually start to pick up late November," he says, describing the market's attitude as "wait and see." The only manufacturers with problems are Hitachi and IBM.

SCSI drives updates
Nebbia says the market is the same as it was last year, with the main focus on 73gigs, with some attention on the 36gigs. "We have seen some increase in requirements for older obsolete drives, and the OEMs are not willing to take substitutions at this point," he reports. The most successful companies, he says, are IBM and Seagate, due to their dynamic technology and the OEMs unwilling to change as quickly. But he cautions that such windows of opportunities are hard to predict. Orders are still coming in for IBM and Seagate 9gigs in a 50pin, 68pin, and 80pin connectors.

Networking market update
NECX analyst Michael Keegan reports that the market is tight for 3com 3c905c tx-10/100 cards and 3com interface cards. Demand is strongest in Europe, and Keegan expects this to continue throughout the month.

3com switches are also popular in the open market. The introduction of new switching products have put a demand on the switches. "With demand still strong on the older models going end of life there must bot be enough manufacturing capacity to handle all of these products and consequently they go into shortage," he explains.

Nortel's shortage also continues. The company had shipped at the beginning of the month but they are once again plagued by backorders, Keegan says. Nortel switches and upgrade modules have been the most troubled. Cisco's ethernet switches, memory modules and firewalls are all in high demand, while Lucent is having a hard time finding buyers for their products.

Flash market update
"The flash market remains uncertain," says NECX analyst Paul Zecher. "Activity is down but not dead." He asserts that the market is in a correction stage right now, because the past six weeks have seen a low demand in the market. The market is now seeing a substantial amount of excess and the lists are growing.

Zecher reports that Intel and AMD pricing is down between 25% and 50% on certain 32megs compared to two months ago, along with other densities. He predicts that the next few months are going to be an excess market, not an oversupply market. "OEMs are getting a good portion of their allocation and they're not prepared to use all of it at this time do they're looking to the open market to move some of it," he says.

Capaciator update
Andy Broe, NECX analyst, reports that although the market is slow right now, there seems to be some indication that there could be some more activity in the next few weeks. He points to two factors: the intent of two cell phone manufacturers to buy Tantalum caps to support their next generation of phones, which may happen during the fourth quarter of this year or first quarter next year; and the rumor that two tantalum manufacturers are going to slow down production and raise production to get more profits. Broe says the effect of this won't be felt until the first quarter next year, but it will be a permanent effect, unless additional mining companies invest in tantalum production.

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Spot prices for this article were current as of Oct. 18, 2000, US East Coast time. For more complete pricing information, contact NECX, Peabody, MA. NECX is a VerticalNet Company.

Edited by Andrea King
Associate Editor, Semiconductoronline.com