Walker confirms; SATS Industry is healthy

Yesterday’s post resulted in an email from Jim Walker, Research VP, Semiconductor Manufacturing, Gartner Dataquest. I’ve known Jim for several years, as he served on Advanced Packaging magazine’s advisory board, and have often consulted with him on market research for the Semiconductor Assembly and Test Services (SATS) sector. I thought his comments should be shared with my whole readership as more than just a comment to the original post. So with his permission, I’ve decided to post his email here, in its entirety:

Françoise –

Thanks for writing your blog on the SATS market today. It appears that someone in the press was taking 2 separate recent reports we wrote on the SATS market and combined them into one, resulting in confusion for the readers. One report on the SATS market share for 2008 (which you referenced) dealt with revenue numbers. The other report, by David Christensen, our factory database analyst, discussed manufacturing facilities and the square footage of factory space that has and will be changing over the next year regarding IDM and the SATS companies. I agree with your assessment that the SATS industry is healthy and not in ‘dire’ straights.

I have received a lot of emails concerning the articles and wondering what was going on with the industry.

Regards,