原创 泡沫破裂，谁会受到伤害？

The May 14-21 issue of The Economist features a cover article on ‘The New Tech Bubble.’ (http://www.economist.com/node/18681576) This came from the magazine that predicted the 2000 Internet bubble and the 2007 real-estate bubble long before those bubbles burst.

Sure enough, LinkedIn’s initial stock offering May 19 closed at the absurd per-share price of $122.70, giving the company a theoretical valuation of $8.9 billion – and remember, LinkedIn is a mere shade of Facebook and Twitter, with even fewer apparent means of monetization. The IPO came a week after Microsoft paid the similarly ridiculous price of $8.5 billion for Skype.

An important point made in The Economist article was that the 1999 technology bubble was all about Internet software companies, but the crash of such companies in 2000 caused an atrocious collateral damage among the OEMs, and even the chip companies, serving the infrastructure for broadband Internet connections. It’s sobering to think that 3/4 of the companies serving optical and DSL broadband markets in 2000, no longer exist today. It isn’t just the optical-switching startups that disappeared – longstanding leaders like Nortel have been sliced and diced in bankruptcy courts.

So could a 2012-13 crash in valuation of technology stocks hurt significant sectors of the hardware industry, including semiconductor sectors such as FPGAs or embedded controllers? There are certainly signs of froth in the market, particularly the large venture round closed in recent months by FPGA startup Tabula Inc. (http://www.fpgagurus.edn.com/blog/fpga-gurus-blog/tabula-crosses-viability-hurdle-financial-infusion-cisco-pact). But the mere fact that Tabula won $108 million from traditional venture capital companies may suggest the money is more stable than much of the cash floating around in 2011.

The Economist suggests that this time around, the cash plowed into small companies on Pier 38 in San Francisco, developing applications for social networks and smartphones, does not come from VCs. Instead, it comes from angel investors operating behind the scenes. Sometimes these companies never take themselves public in IPOs, but remain privately financed well into maturity. Also, this bubble is much more international in scope, with leading boom companies, as well as angel investors, coming from Russia and Asia.

Still, the fact that some US- and Europe-based OEMs are abandoning manufacturing efforts in China, and the related fact that several China-based companies are displaying disappointing trajectories, suggests that a bubble-crash that affected China, Vietnam, and Four Tigers economies could have fallout that reaches the U.S., and reaches hardware companies, even in the semiconductor sector.

Xilinx and Altera certainly don’t need to care if LinkedIn or Facebook, or application companies like Zynga that serve social networks, go into a contraction spiral. Nor should they care if half of the little companies developing clever apps in Apple’s AppStore crash and burn. But if a crash impacts small embedded startups working in factory imaging, automotive vision systems, or real-time signal processing, you can bet FPGAs feel the chill – as will DSP vendors, ARM licensees, and physical-layer chip specialists.

So what can be done? One clear lesson from 1999-2000 and 2007-08 is that irrational exuberance can sober up with your help. Just as friends don’t let friends drive drunk, friends shouldn’t let friends drive up stock prices. No social network should be given a higher valuation than a big oil or manufacturing firm – and LinkedIn, in particular, scarcely deserves a share price above $25 or so. Some people playing the market think that getting in briefly to drive up a price of a hot stock is a victimless crime. But if investors in the current era are not extremely careful, the collateral damage can reach back to many victims, including many FPGA players, and including you.