Although some analysts expect the computer market to grow this year, the facts sometimes cannot proof it, moreover, occasionally, the information coming from different sources even contradict each other. According to VLSI Research, utilised capacities of semiconductor manufacturing fabs decreases. What is even more important, there is a very dangerous trend when slides down not only utilisation, but also book-to-bill ratio.

On average, in June 2002 86.5% of the worlds total capacities of microelectronic chips were utilised. In July, this value was down 2.3% to 84.2%, it is estimated that this month only 81.9% of all mentioned manufacturing capacities will be in use. The book-to-bill ratio that represents the amount of orders to the amount of actual products shipped and is normally a bit higher than 1.0 showing the growth of a facility, apparently was down to 0.95 in June and even 0.90 in August, meaning that sometimes companies cannot sell already made devices.

The industry analysts are very concerned about the trend because it can cause further economical shocks for the semiconductor industry, causing many businesses going bankrupt. In fact, observing the current situation with memory-makers, we can easily notice their hard life: Hynix is basically a dead duck and also not everything fine with its rival Micron.