Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. The question-and-answer session will be conducted electronically. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Romit Shah with Lehman Brothers.
Romit Shah - Lehman Brothers
Thanks. Steve, you provided fairly wide guidance for the December period. Could you just run through some of the swing factors that could get you either to the high end of the guidance or the low end of guidance?
Steve Sanghi
Well, Romit swing factors really are customers' behavior. We have seen in prior cycles when the customers' businesses are soft, many of them have fiscal years ends and when the businesses are soft, they use holidays to take extended shutdowns or close down the operations or clean their operating plants, and we're hearing some of that in our conversations with the larger customers, but those plans are not firm.
And we have seen in the last quarter, from some of the customers we met, that they told us what they were going to buy in the quarter, many of them were down significantly to that expectation. So, customers don't know themselves in this timeframe what they are going to do, because they are relying on their businesses doing better and their end customers buying.
And when the segment confidence in the housing, consumer and other segments continues to slip and you are starting to see that happening now in some of the other segments through Arrow and Altera and Xilinx announcements, which were not available at the time of our preannouncement, and many investors felt that we had a stand-alone problem. We can now start to see that there is some company there.
And so believe our customers don’t know and it will really depend on customer's plans and behavior really where those numbers will come out.
Operator
Our second question comes from Chris Danely, J.P. Morgan.
Chris Danely – J.P. Morgan
Thanks, Steve. Hey, Steve, now that we're sort of working away through these things, how do you compare this downturn or correction versus the previous problems we've had, and I guess the reason I ask is that, assuming that the December quarter is down that would be three out of five quarters with negative growth and I think the only other time that happened was the tech bust. So if could just take a step back and kind of compare this time right now versus the previous downturn?
Steve Sanghi
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