The “competitive environment’s good” for Dish Network’s wireless 5G network rollout, said Chairman Charlie Ergen on a Q2 earnings call Wednesday. The “big picture” amid historically high inflation is that everyone's wireless connection “is a necessity,” he said. “After food and water and shelter, it’s just about next in line.”
Business conditions “continue to be strong” as viewed through Microchip Technology’s “internal indicators,” said CEO Ganesh Moorthy on an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q1 ended June 30. Microchip’s revenue increased 25.1% year over year to $1.96 billion, marking the seventh straight quarter of record revenue growth, said Moorthy. Microchip expects to remain “supply-constrained” through the rest of 2022 and into 2023, he said. Demand in the quarter “continued to be insatiable despite the capacity increases we have implemented so far,” he said. Microchip’s “unsupported backlog,” defined as backlog that customers wanted shipped to them in the June quarter but couldn’t be delivered, climbed again, he said. “We exited the June quarter with our highest unsupported backlog ever, with unsupported backlog ... well above the actual revenue we achieve,” said the CEO. “We are cognizant of the weakening macro conditions resulting from rising inflation and the actions being taken by central banks in response.” Microchip is aware that there has been some “inventory build” at its major customers, “as can be seen in their balance sheet,” said Moorthy. Some of the build is likely due to “strategic” buffering, as a hedge against running out of supply, he said. “At the same time, the level of expedites and customer escalations we’re experiencing has not abated, indicating that demand and supply remain imbalanced from many customer situations.” Microchip is working “to best utilize the available supply,” he said. Its strategy is to “thoughtfully reallocate” future supply to “customers in distress,” he said.
Despite the “additional softness” in the PC market in recent months, Advanced Micro Devices thinks it’s “very well positioned to navigate through the current environment,” said CEO Lisa Su on an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q2 ended June 25. Q2 revenue in AMD’s client segment, which includes desktop and notebook PC processors and chipsets, was $2.2 billion, up 25% year over year, driven by a “richer mix” of Ryzen-branded mobile processor sales, said the company. But AMD is adopting “a more conservative outlook on the PC business” for calendar 2022, said Su. “A quarter ago, we would have thought that the PC business would be down ... high-single digits. Our current view of the PC business is that it will be down ... mid-teens, and that’s contemplated into our third-quarter guidance.” That would put the industry PC shipments "somewhere around" 290 million to 300 million units for the year, said Su. AMD "deliberately focused" its PC market attention on "the more premium segments," she said. "There are some parts of the PC market that are very price-sensitive, like the low end." AMD has "tried to reduce our exposure there going forward," she said. "I don’t think the dynamics change a lot. I think it’s always a very competitive market and the key thing there is to have a very strong road map."
For Cirrus Logic, a top supplier of smartphone audio chips, the Android business this year “has really been supply-constrained,” said CEO John Forsyth on an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q1 ended June 25. “One of the impacts of that is having to be very selective about which circuits we chase within smartphones and elsewhere, but that has had an impact on our Android business.” It’s not a question of “being short to customers in a given month,” he said. “It’s a question of not committing to certain designs, if we didn’t feel confident we have the supply.” Cirrus anticipates its Android business “still being supply-constrained through the rest of fiscal 2023" ending late March, he said. “That said, we are well embedded in the flagship tier of that market and insofar as we can expand supply, we will look to do that and look to continue to build on the momentum that we have there.”
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative often found itself weighing the possible harm to U.S. consumers from the Lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs against the need to give the duties enough teeth to curb China’s allegedly unfair trade practices, said the agency in its 90-page “remand determination,” filed Monday in docket 1:21-cv-52 at the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Demand in chipmaker Onsemi’s key “focus areas” of automotive and industrial “continues to outpace supply,” said CEO Hassane El-Khoury on a Q2 earnings call Monday. Record Q2 revenue of $2.09 billion was up 25% year over year and was the first time Onsemi -- formerly called On Semiconductor -- topped $2 billion in revenue in a single quarter, he said. The “volatility” in global energy markets is “driving an accelerated adoption of electric vehicles,” said the CEO. Though internal combustion engine vehicle sales were nearly flat in 2021, EVs grew by 94% and are expected to rise at a 22% compound annual growth rate in the next five years, reaching 45% of “total light vehicle” unit sales, he said. EVs require up to $700 of incremental Onsemi content for drive-train and onboard charging compared with an internal combustion engine car, he said.
DOJ asked the U.S. Court of International Trade, in a motion Monday on behalf of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, for permission to correct the administrative record in the Section 301 litigation to include 136 pages of documents not previously submitted in the cases. Virtually all the documents previously were in the public domain, and they include mostly news releases and Federal Register notices announcing USTR actions connected with the imposition of the four rounds of Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports dating to 2018. USTR “was aware of the facts contained in all these documents, such that those facts were considered when making the challenged decisions” about imposing the Lists 3 and 4A tariffs, said the agency: “Upon drafting the remand results as ordered by the Court, the USTR has determined that additional documents either were indirectly considered in the process of issuing the contested determinations, or they were issued in conjunction with the contested determinations, such that they should be part of the administrative record.” The remand results themselves, to address what the court in April found to be Administrative Procedure Act violations at USTR in the deficient way in which it imposed the Lists 3 and 4A tariffs, were due at the court by the close of business Aug. 1. The DOJ said it reached out Thursday to Matthew Nicely and Pratik Shah, lead Akin Gump attorneys for test-case plaintiffs HMTX Industries and Jasco Products, to gauge their position on the motion. According to the DOJ, Nicely and Shah said they “take no position on the motion, on the understanding that the Government has forfeited reliance on documents not cited in its previous merits briefing to this Court.” Nicely didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
What might otherwise have been a jubilant moment on Intel’s Q2 earnings call Thursday for CEO Pat Gelsinger immediately after congressional passage of the chips legislation he had lobbied heavily for (see 2207280060) instead degenerated into a sobering acknowledgement of Intel's missed financial targets for the quarter. Revenue of $15.3 billion was down 17% year over year and $2.7 billion below Intel’s April target, while earnings per share of 29 cents were 79% lower than a year earlier and 41 cents short of April's projections.
Sony shipped 1.3 million TVs globally in its fiscal Q1 ended June 30, 41% fewer than in the year-earlier quarter and 19% below the volume in fiscal Q4, reported the company Friday. The TV unit sales decline forced a 4% year-over-year revenue decrease in Sony’s core consumer tech sector.
Apple is “one of the world’s richest companies and one with a proud tradition of innovation,” but neither of those attributes “should make Apple above the law,” commented Charles Swerdlow, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Beverly Hills, in docket 337-TA-1266 at the International Trade Commission. If the Apple Watch infringed AliveCor’s patented electrocardiogram technology, as an ITC administrative law judge ruled in an initial determination June 27 that it did, “then failing to punish Apple will only encourage it and other large corporations to copy future innovations developed by other small companies,” said Swerdlow Wednesday. He differed from other cardiologists who urged the ITC not to ban Apple Watch imports for Tariff Act Section 337 violations because the product’s ECG functions have helped atrial fibrillation patients seek treatment earlier than they would have otherwise (see 2207270036). Swerdlow described himself as a named inventor on 35 U.S. patents related to the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias, “and I have commercialized several of these patents.” Wearing his inventor’s hat, he said, “I have had a few difficult experiences in which large companies were able to effectively copy my inventions without consequences because I lacked the financial resources to pursue an infringement suit.” Sparing the Apple Watch from the import ban that the ALJ recommended may be “good for Apple and -- in the short term – good for some of its customers,” said Swerdlow. “But it will do a deep disservice to the nation’s inventors, undercut innovation in our society, and encourage public distrust that the largest companies are above the law.” Swerdlow thinks a “sufficiently severe penalty” like an import ban could protect companies like AliveCor and “deter Apple and other large corporations from future actions that unlawfully copy inventions patented by smaller companies and individual inventors,” he said. Apple didn’t comment Thursday. It filed public interest comments in the docket Wednesday that were marked confidential.