Joe Osha Quotes on Business & Commerce (6 Quotes)

We've seen investment in capacity go up quite a bit and we had a scare this summer with wireless. So you can make a case that the business is in trouble. We try to focus on slightly longer-term fundamentals. The relationship between spending and revenue in this business is still reasonable. Visibility is still good. Pricing is good. Let's not forget, wireless handset demand is growing 50 percent over year-on-year. So with stocks down a bit and the fundamentals still solid, we though it was time to declare the mid-cycle correction over.

Texas Instruments' decision to buy analog specialist Burr-Brown fits well with the company's stated objective of building its presence in the analog business. Despite the somewhat rich valuation for the deal, we think that the deal makes sense for TI. We reiterate our intermediate-term and long-term buy ratings for the stock.

While many of the stocks in this group are already down by 50 percent over the past several weeks, we believe that inventory concerns, coupled with telecom service-provider capital-spending concerns, will weigh on the group for the next one to two quarters. We note that the group in aggregate still has the highest valuations in the semiconductor business, even after the recent decline.

Intel's status as an industry bellwether has allowed the stock to move with the industry in the past.

The semiconductor sector in general is in very good shape the industry hasn't invested enough in capacity and that is actually very good for chip makers. Intel is often treated as a proxy for the chip sector, so the chip sector is doing well and so is Intel.

What we see happening is a bottoming to the rate of change in the semiconductor business, which has been negative and less capacity being added by the fourth quarter, which is also good. So, although companies themselves are still very conservative we think that the worst is past in terms of the downturn here.