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Xy, I'm sure the long term outlook for memory chips is great. I'll repeat my frequent argument, though, for your benefit. DRAM, and semiconductors in general, is an industry that is going to be faced with ever increasing capital cost expenditures. When it costs 5 bil. to make a fab, as its expected around the turn of the century, only big companies are going to be able to be in the business- unless the little companies merge or develop alliances or something similar they won't be able to transition into this next stage...and there are a lot of companies, many of them not appreciably large, involved in DRAM. In Taiwan, chicken farmers started building fabs following the big profits in '95- part of their strategy is to take a Japan like transition into an economy with a value-added technology industry through commodities. Anyways, next year is the year everyone worried about in 95 when things were so great, because next year is when the overcapacity is supposed to get really bad. There's no way around a huge change in this industry- this is the inflection point around which these changes will take place. |
