EDA Market Stabilizing?

The economy is limping back on track, as is evident from the increase in the number of PC shipments and smartphones, sales of which grew in Q309. In fact, silicon revenues were up in Q309 over Q209 in a reversal of the declines of the last few quarters. This is of course good news for the semiconductor industry. The EDA industry though will take a few more quarters to recover as its growth lags that of the semiconductor industry growth by a few quarters. >>>

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Seagate, SanDisk Recovering Nicely

Last year, Seagate was expected to take over SanDisk as part of its plan to enter the solid-state drive (SSD) market. That did not happen, but Seagate has entered the market organically. The company recently launched Pulsar, its first enterprise SSD for blade and general servers. On the other hand, pSSD Gen2 SSD from SanDisk was recently adopted by Sony for its new Vaio X ultra-thin laptop. SSDs act as replacements for hard disk drives (HDDs) in PCs by using flash memory to store data. The rising demand for notebook PCs that have low storage needs has boosted the prospects of the SSD market, which is expected to grow at CAGR of 143% from 2008 to to 2013 to reach $10.8 billion. Let’s take a look at Seagate and SanDisk in this post. >>>

Moving To The Cloud: Informatica And Autodesk

The business intelligence (BI) tools market continues to grow at a healthy pace, primarily driven by maintenance revenue rather than new license revenue. According to an IDC report published in mid-2009, the BI tools market is estimated at $7.8 billion in 2008, up 10.6% over 2007. SAP is the market leader in BI with a 20% share, followed by SAS with 11%. In another report published in 2009, IDC estimates the worldwide data warehouse platform software market to have grown at 11% to reach $7.2 billion in 2008. The key players in the data warehouse platform software are Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. >>>

Samsung, Motorola Filling Smartphone Gaps

Samsung, which started out as a small manufacturer of black-and-white televisions, was able to celebrate its fortieth birthday last month as the world’s leading manufacturer of not just television sets but also memory chips and LCD panels. It is also the No. 2 cell phone handset vendor with an approximate 21% share, while Motorola has slipped to No. 5 with a 4.7% share. However, Motorola’s luck seems to be changing with its new smartphone, the Droid, which was launched at the end of October and which Time magazine recently named the “Gadget of the Year.” >>>

Garmin, TiVO On The Decline

Google recently signed an audience research deal with TiVo while at the same time making things difficult for personal navigation device (PND) maker Garmin, since Google’s Android smartphones provide navigation applications free. For the first time in its history, Garmin posted a year of revenue decline as more and more smartphones are being sold with add-on navigation tools. >>>

SaaS Consolidation Overview

The SaaS sector has seen quite a few acquisitions this year, the major ones coming from Adobe, Intuit, and ADP. The recent economic downturn has spurred this acquisition activity in the sector, which has turned out to be relatively less vulnerable to the effects of the economic downturn.  >>>

Electronic Arts Pushing Digital

The gaming industry is going through a turmoil: demand is there, but margins seem to be disappearing. Higher sales are driven by price cuts, and profitability is an issue. The industry is looking for a new idea or a game console that will shake up the gaming world. Sony seems to be planning to release such a console in 2010. In a recent interview, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, said that we’ll see some new ideas coming out of Sony Japan in 2010 and indicated that a console could be launched next year. This could have a positive impact for the industry and invigorate the gaming companies. As for now, the gorillas of the gaming world are barely surviving. >>>

Securing Cyberspace: Websense, McAfee, and Symantec

IDC forecasts the global Web security market to grow at a CAGR of 12.3% to $2.5 billion in 2013 from $1.4 billion in 2008, with SaaS Web security being the fastest-growing segment at a CAGR of 46.5% between 2008 and 2013. Also, with the increasing use of Web 2.0 by corporations and more spam, data leaks and malware, it has become imperative for businesses to manage data and security on a real-time basis. This presents Internet security companies with a host of opportunities. >>>

Dell Declining

According to IDC, Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), which had annual revenue of $61.1 billion, has lost market share and it has lost its No.2 spot to Acer in the global market. It has, of course, lost the top spot in the U.S. market to HP. Dell’s recently reported third quarter results were also disappointing, missing both earnings and revenue estimates. >>>

ZipRealty, Move, Monster, Shutterfly: Signs of Recovery

To help revive the real estate sector, the Obama government approved the extension of an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers until April 30, 2010. The credit, earlier scheduled to lapse in November of this year, is now available till the end of 2010 in a phased out fashion. The goverment is also controlling mortgage rates by pumping in funds. The Federal Reserve added $1.25 trillion into mortgage-backed securities to try to lower mortgage rates and loosen credit via a program scheduled to end by March next year. Recently, the National Association of Realtors recorded monthly resales growth in October of 10.1% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.1 million, thus registering the biggest monthly increase in a decade. Home prices are also lower, and median sales prices are 7% lower over the year and 25% below the peak. But, despite lower prices and additional incentives, overall house sales are nearly 16% below their peak sale levels in 2005. Online realtors, ZipRealty and Move are thus finding recovery a very slow process. >>>