Mr. Berger: Let me give you a little context. If you go back about a year ago to last summer - that was the old, pre-recession world, right? And demand was up at a higher level. Obviously, the US was teetering, but we hadn't yet fallen into this global recession. Then in September, Bear Stearns and Lehman collapsed, and we had a global credit crisis. Credit is really the lifeblood of any economy. So when the credit crisis happened and the recession set in, the stock market took a big dive and demand deteriorated. So we did have a step down in global consumption among both consumers and enterprises. But when credit contracts and becomes unavailable, beyond the typical recessionary drop in demand, everything else stops, too. And that's what we saw last Q4 2009. We saw companies like HP (HPQ), Dell (DELL), Samsung and Nokia (NOK) take their chip and finished goods inventories down as low as possible. So on top of the deterioration in demand, there has been a massive worldwide inventory drain. That happened in the fourth and first quarter. In the fourth quarter, in fact, more chip orders were cancelled than were placed. We actually had a quarter of net negative orders for the entire semiconductor industry, which has never before happened. Think about that. The 250-billion-a-year industry had net negative orders in the fourth quarter because everybody said, "I don't know if I need this product; I don't know what I'm going to build; I don't know what demand is." And as we moved into the first quarter, everybody shut down their factories and ordered employees to take a month or two months off work. Obviously, there were deep head count cuts. For the most part, the chip companies have scaled down dramatically in size. We've seen head count cuts of anywhere from 5% to 25% in some of these companies. In the fourth quarter, we had negative net orders and a massive inventory drain because nobody knew what global demand would be. The world stared down into the abyss, and we were looking over the edge. We almost fell down into that abyss, but then in the first quarter, post-Christmas, things got a little bit better. Obviously, credit flow was still tight and the world was still draining a lot of inventory. In some cases, inventories got taken down to zero levels, and customers were forced to start buying again. That happened around February. From the seasonal and pre-recession peak of shipment levels in the third quarter of 2008 to the first-quarter 2009 trough, we saw industry sales fall by 40%. In my view, this was worse than the deterioration in demand. Demand deterioration plus seasonality should not have caused a 40% drop in sales over these two quarters. The real reason for the sharp drop in sales was the inventory reductions going on throughout the world at every level of the supply chain. What we've seen in the second quarter is strong sequential growth for the chip guys because their Q1 shipment level was negatively impacted by so much inventory drain. But in the second quarter, the world drained a lot less inventory. Inventory was still draining, but less than in the first quarter. That drove the strong sequential growth in the second quarter off that very low first-quarter base. As we look into the third quarter, it's continuing. We see there is not enough inventory out there in the channel. The HPs, the Dells, the Nokias and the Ciscos (CSCO) of the world are likely to do some replenishing because, ÔA,' we've got a seasonal uptick in demand. Everybody is starting to build inventory for the holiday selling season. And ÔB,' the companies have found that the decline in global demand hasn't been as bad as expected. So as we have moved through 2009, unit sales forecasts have improved for PCs, handsets and LCD TVs. In January we had sales and demand expectations which proved to be overly negative, especially on the consumer side. The consumer is the one doing the spending right now; not the enterprises. And it's the consumers in Asia that are the strongest. Asia is back to growing fairly robustly again. China's stimulus package had a significant impact on consumer spending. We've seen strength in PCs, handsets, smart phones and consumer devices, like LCD TVs. And the US, while not fantastic by any stretch, has also shown some resiliency for desirable products like smart phones, netbooks and mini-notebooks; people still want these things. Apple's (AAPL) products are very popular.
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