Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you, sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. (Operator’s Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Stephen Chin with UBS.
Stephen Chin - UBS
Great. Hi, Steve. Hi, Ernie. Congrats on the strong sales and shipment guidance there. My question is what customer types, Steve, would you say is driving this upside? Is it mostly (inaudible) spending aggressively to move from trench to stack or is it also these foundry customers continuing their strong equipment activity?
Stephen G. Newberry
It's fairly broad based. You have a number of DRAM players, certainly the ones that you mentioned, but also there's investment going on with the leading band players, and then certainly as a percent of the total, the foundry players, particularly the two biggest ones are spending at levels that are historically greater than what they typically have, at least as a percentage of the total market. So the shipment activity at this point in time is actually pretty broad based and that's encouraging.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Satya Kumar with Credit Suisse.
Satya Kumar - Credit Suisse
Yeah. Hi, Steve. Just wanted to parse your statements and your thoughts on what shipments might look like as we head into next year. You mentioned that the first half next year equipment spend rate would be slightly higher than the second half, and as I sort of look at your shipment run rate in the second half of this year, you're sort of implying a 425-ish average run rate in the first half. I just wanted to think about how you think about your shipments in Q1 because I guess you're also gaining some market share and getting some traction in clean. So I was wondering if you can add some color on how you see directionally shipments holding up into Q1?
Stephen G. Newberry
Well, what I said in my prepared comments was that at this point in time, if you take the shipments in the second half of '09, that what customers are indicating they're going to want us to ship in the first half of 2010 would be flat to slightly up. And so if we look into the March quarter where we have some degree of visibility, the March quarter looks to be, from a shipment standpoint, up from the December quarter and the reality relative to June is at this point in time with the lead times for a company like us being so fast that really kind of trying to forecast June as just that.
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