News September 30, 18:45 Eastern Time
Chip stocks tumble on nuclear incident, memory prices
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Shares of semiconductor makers tumbled on Thursday as investors worried about the potential impact from a nuclear accident in Japan and a drop in memory chip prices, analysts said.
Japanese officials said 27 people were treated for
radiation exposure in the country's worst-ever nuclear accident at a Japanese uranium processing plant about 90 miles (140 km)northeast of Tokyo on Thursday.
Analysts and traders said that investors were worried that the nuclear incident may affect chip companies with big
manufacturing plants in the Tokyo area. Investors were already nervous about a bigger-than-expected impact on chip makers and PC makers after the Taiwanese earthquake last week.
Amid a broad drop in the sector, LSI Logic Corp.
fell $5 to $51.50 on the New York Stock Exchange; National
Semiconductor Corp. closed down $2.31 to $30.50 on the NYSE; Cypress Semiconductor Corp. lost $4.375 to $21.50
on the Big Board; Atmel Corp. declined $2.56 to $33.81
on Nasdaq; and Xilinx Inc. eased $1.68 to $65.53 on Nasdaq. Chip giant Intel Corp. was off $0.875 to $74.625 on Nasdaq.
"The stocks were a little weak when the day started, and
the news about the radiation leak in Japan served as a catalyst for people to take profits," said one technology stock trader.
Milpitas, Calif.-based LSI Logic has a chip manufacturing plant 55 miles from the incident in Japan, but said everything was "business as usual," at its plant in Tsukuba.
"There is a significant range of mountains in between the (LSI) site and the accident," said Kevin Brett, an LSI
spokesman. "I just talked to our executive vice president of worldwide manufacturing, who said there is no impact."
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