After the bell, we heard from Applied Materials. This is the company that basically is the largest manufacturer of chip making equipment. It gave a better than feared sales forecast for the current quarter. We want to bring into the conversation Bloomberg's Ian King. He covers all things semiconductors from our studios and bureau in San Francisco. You know, it's always a pleasure. What do you make of what we
had from aim At today? Well, any time a company comes into earnings with all of the sort of clouds on the horizon and everybody worried about where it's going and analyss projecting a contraction and it says, oh no, actually we're going to grow. Clearly is going to cause some relief. And that's what we've certainly seen today. You know,
they're arguing very strongly. Hey, look, technology still counts. The chip makers need to get better at what they're doing, and we're kind of route one to do in that. So that's our argument and it's holding up for now. I think the elephant in the room, though, is the situation with US and China, the Biden administration withholding some of this advanced semiconductor technology from the Chinese, and I'm wondering whether or not Applied material to address that point.
We I mean, you've now that it was a giant part of what they had to talk to today. They said, look, these restrictions that we saw came came in in October the seventh are going to cost US two and a half billion dollars of lost revenue in this year unless the government sort of behaves itself and starts giving some of these licenses. And then if we're looking, if everything goes okay, might just be do we only lose one
and a half billion dollars of lost revenue? So can you give me a sense of the types of semiconductors that may be produced using this equipment and whether we can glean anything from what Applied Materials had to say about let's say the memory chip market versus microprocessors versus some of the chips that are used in phones. Yeah, I mean, from a market perspective, memory is obviously in big trouble right now, and all of the producers are
cutting their orders for equipment. Not very good at all. Applied said, look, you know that's bad, but guess what people who are making logic chips, the kind of processes are going to your iPhone or your PC. They're actually doing relatively okay, and you know, our orders in that
particular area are not too bad. So when you look at what we heard from in video yesterday, one of the leading manufacturers of those graphics processors that are used in some of the computer systems where cloud computing is involved, also a critical component for the gaming devices, did aim at give anything into the graphics chips market. Well, not
not specifically the graphics chip chip market. I mean, that would be advanced logic, but if you throw what goes that into the mix overall, the kind of conclusion that we've sort of drawing from what's said this week is, you know, the big iron, the enterprise systems, the cloud systems. If you're selling technology into those markets, or technologies that makes technology that goes in those markets, maybe things aren't as bad. Maybe this recession concern is overblown. And that's
what these companies are sort of suggesting. If you sort of aggregate what they're saying, consumer and other areas are still pretty grim. Where does AMATT measure up in terms of how is it measuring up against competitors like K l A. Or Land Research or the Dutch company a s mL. Yeah, I mean that's a very good question.
They claim the technologies are allowing them to gain market share, but if you look at you know, the revenue forecast, they along with Lime Research, are really the ones that are getting hurt by this China action, by these trade by these you know, these trade restrictions. Um. So you know, pluses on one side, minuses on the other. Okay, Ian good stuff always a pleasure. Thanks for making time for US. Ian King covers the semiconductor industry for US at Bloomberg