Industry Food Chain

This reminds me of primary school days, when the small fish eats plankton and the big fish eats the small fish and all the crap right? Well with production and business, it's almost the same.

Industry food chain refers to the process by which raw material is being passed through different manufacturers as semi-finished products and finally being made into end-products for the consumer. The most famous one is the semiconductor food chain. But since this food chain is far too complicated, even for sell-side semiconductor analysts, I shall use another relative simple one.

Honey -> Bee -> Bird -> Human

Ok, ok, before you click the "x" at the top-right corner,

Wafer suppliers -> Foundry -> Chip makers -> Consumer electronics

Well that's the simple semiconductor food chain, but what makes the actual chain so complicated is that at every level, there are equipment suppliers and fabless design houses and testing equipment makers and OEM manufacturers so the whole thing turns into a huge spider-web which is good for putting around your workstation to impress sweet young secretaries.

Ok, but what's so useful about learning this? The short answer is Bottleneck. By understanding the food chain we can find out where is bottleneck. i.e. the point in the food chain when there is less capacity than demand, or where there is limited no. of players and hence they have the bargaining power over everyone else. (See Porter 5 Forces.)

Take the example of the hard-disk drive (HDD) industry. HDD is part of the huge spider web within the IT/semiconductor food chain. If we take a closer look at its food chain specifically, it is something like

Materials (Magnets, metal screws, glass discs)
-> Components (recording heads, motors, connectors)
-> Hard-disk drive makers (Seagate, Western Digital etc)
-> Consumer electronics (PC, Ipod, HDD-DVD recorder etc)

There are currently only 5 or 6 players globally in the assembler space. Seagate being the market leader with 40% share, followed by Western Digital and some Japanese and Korean players. However there are countless material suppliers, component makers, as well as consumer electronics players.

2 years ago when Ipod became the No.1 item on everyone's wishlist and when Flash memory was still too expensive, HDD was in super short supply. A bottleneck formed at the assembler space gave HDD assemblers huge bargaining power over its suppliers and customers.

As we can expect, HDD assemblers' stock prices shot through the roof together with Apple and those who have bought these assemblers laughed their way to the bank. Well that is if they sold, today flash memory is rapidly replacing HDD and we all know what is happening now.