John Akers and the Semiconductor Industry Association both (and Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer too, come to that): the merest statistical twitch that could be read as suggesting that things out there aren’t quite as bad as they have been, and they start acting as if the recession is over and full-blown recovery is well under way. So it is that the US Semiconductor Industry guys herald a 0.1 improvement in the (still loss-making) book-to-bill ratio by saying that after reaching a low for the year, the semiconductor industry’s key market indicator… rebounded from 0.94 in September to 0.95 in October. The organisation helpfully tags the September figure with a footnote saying that it’s provisional, as is the October figure, and when they are finalised, they frequently change by 0.1 to 0.3 points, which means that October could still be revised down to 0.92 as well as up to 0.97. October orders in the US on a three-month moving average were $1,252.2m, up 3.9% on the September figure and 3.5% up on the year-ago figure. Average shipments for the three months to October were up 2.5% to $1319.9m on September, and up 5.0% on October 1990. Actual shipments in October were $1249.7m, down 15.6% from September, which had an extra week. The August ratio has been finalised and stands at 0.97, up from the preliminary 0.94.
