Cymer Sees Continuing Downturn

The outlook for the semiconductor industry remains grim, based on financial results reported yesterday by San Diego’s Cymer (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYMI]]), which supplies 65 percent of the specialized laser equipment used worldwide to make integrated circuits. Cymer says it expects revenue to decline between 40 percent and 50 percent in its first-quarter from the fourth-quarter, which showed a 28 percent drop in sales compared to the previous year. During a conference call, CEO Robert Akins says chip makers have cut back on orders across the board. Akins says logic-chip makers constitute the most active segment, while orders from memory-chipmakers showed the steepest decline.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.