Ron and All,
Here is a story that tells of further signs that the bottom has passed.....
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 1 (Reuter) - KLA Tencor Chief Financial Officer Bob Boehlke said the recently completed combination of KLA Instruments and Tencor will help it grow revenues after a recent industry slowdown.
"We're now at about a billion dollar run rate just annualized in the last quarter," he said in a presentation to a Hambrecht & Quist technology conference here.
Boehlke told Reuters after the presentation that KLA believes the industry slowdown reached its bottom in the December 1996 quarter and that revenues will increase from its current run-rate.
The combined company is a market leader in the supply of yield management products for semiconductor plants.
In the presentation, Boehlke said KLA-Tencor will benefit in particular from fresh revenue growth in being able to sell a more complete product line and manage customer accounts in a more centralized fashion.
"We get about 20 percent to 40 percent additional sales from accounts where we can set up general management," he said, adding this sales technique had largely been modeled on procedures used by semiconductor equipment heavyweight Applied Materials <AMAT.O>.
The combined KLA-Tencor is particularly strong on the wafer product side of its business, with products in virtually every category and a market share of roughly 90 percent, he noted in his presentation.
Boehlke said combined gross margins after the merger could be boosted somewhat by margins at Tencor, which he said were "a little higher," while Tencor also generally ran higher sales general and administration cost levels.
While the merged company may be able to take some savings in merging its general and administration resources, he said any overlapping staff and resources in other areas were largely being redeployed.
"We're not going to get a big blood let in this merger," he said of the combined company cost structure.
Improved procurement economics, he said, could help result in rising margins over time."
(sam.perry@reuters.com, Palo Alto Bureau 415 846 5400) |
