Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Sure sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll know be conducting a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). Thank you. Our first question is from the line of Brett Hodess from Banc of America. Please proceed with your question sir.
Brett Hodess - Banc of America
Good morning. So, I have couple of questions for you. First when you look at the improvement in utilization that you mentioned in the beginning of your comments, can you talk to us a little bit about is the utilization improving both in your IDN and your sub-con customers and maybe do you have some kind of estimate of where we're at on that utilization rate now?
Scott Kulicke
Sure, Brett. Let me talk a little bit about utilization. I'll start with a preamble. For those of you who don't know about this, we spend a lot of time measuring our customers' utilization. We go out every week and poll about 20,000 bonders worth of customers and get a sense of how many buyback we often by product line are being used at that point in time and it is a data stream that we've had to a long time.
I would caution you... I will give you some numbers and then I would caution people to not put huge faith in the absolute accuracy rather than thinking this is an analog measure and to what's important are shifts over time. Most of 2008, capacity utilization the way we measured it bounced around in the middle 70% range and that's down from the middle 80s at the peak of the last cycle.
Then in October of 2008 capacity utilization again as we measure it fell off a cliff so that by the holiday it was down in the 40%, middle or high 40% ranges. It was a funny 15 point bounce in early January, then it collapsed again back down into the 45%-46% range.
But since then we've seen it steadily climb. So its now back in the high 60s. It's really dramatic when you look at the curve both at how it went down and how it's come back up again and that's a period that we're characterizing as an inventory burn phase for our customers and their customers.
We are quite heartened that it is come back as quickly as it has. It is still by any kind of objective measure not good but it's a whole lot less bad than it was and the body language and the commentary we're getting from our customers is that they expect continued sequential improvement in their capacity utilization.
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