Let the good times roll?

How to decide if a blog entry is worth writing: you have more to say than will fit in a 140 character Twitter post. (For those interested, my Twitter ID is kewms.)

In this case, I'm celebrating the end of the recession. North American semiconductor equipment manufacturers booked more than a billion dollars in orders in January, for the first time since May, 2008. Though still a pretty weak number in historical terms, that probably does mean people are buying actual equipment, as opposed to consumables, service contracts, and so forth.

(In the depths of the recession, people joked that even a single package of O-rings would be enough to move the book-to-bill number.)

Equipment purchases are good news for a couple of reasons. First, they usually mean that the purchasing fab is running at 80-90% of capacity and the demand outlook is positive. Second, they mean that the customer is able to get financing on terms it considers reasonable.