Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Our first question comes from C.J. Muse of Barclays Capital.
C.J. Muse – Barclays Capital
Yes, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. I guess, first part, in your prepared remarks you talked about calling it an early stage of recovery and I guess I was hoping you could talk about your visibility into the first half of 2010, I guess particularly around sustainability of spending from the foundries.
Rick Wallace
Sure, C. J., it's Rick. What we're seeing now I think is a couple things. One, a number of foundries that are investing has broadened so clearly we saw that has a benefit. And the other thing we're seeing is the advanced technology that is really being pushed by the foundries now, there are a lot of starts have happened and there's a lot of demand for the events out of the foundries. They just have to make investments to catch up to that. Whether it can remain at exactly this level or go down, I think it's hard to say, but on balance, when we look out to December and think forward, we think that there continues to be opportunity in the foundry space for a couple reasons.
One is there's increasing demand on the low end and we don't have a large percent of the revenues generated on the advanced design rules. The second one is I think we're finally seeing the effect of the guys that went offline a few years ago, some of the major guys that were investing that had shifted their production over to the foundries and now we're seeing foundries finally starting to invest to essentially absorb some of that CapEx so we see the situation pretty good because of the challenges they face and I think probably favoring inspection Metrology in particular for their needs.
C.J. Muse – Barclays Capital
Great, and then I guess is my quick follow-up, you talked also about the Puma 9500 Darkfield Inspection and seeing some success there. I was hoping I guess in light of that success you could talk about capital intensity for process control from memory users and what kind of trends you're seeing there?
Rick Wallace
Sure. It's still I think early to say because most of what we've seen in the memory side has been relative to development and so I think it's really more customer-specific what kind of intensity they have than sector in particular, so there's a range across them, but I think the current way we see the market developing much the same way the foundries had to turn on and invest more heavily to get their yields up, we're seeing some of the early signs in memory that will be similar to that, but I'd say it's too early to say that thesis has been proven out. So I'd say we are where we were with foundry, say, a year ago relative to memory.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
