You may have the right "take" on the company. I found the following article this morning. I have copied the part that discusses the background and FSII's situation (one man's opinion of the situation)
Jun 11, 1999
Bull Sessions With the Merrill Crowd Offer Insight on Tech Stocks
By Adam Lashinsky
Silicon Valley Columnist
Good investors are constantly looking for ideas. Publicity-hungry investment banking analysts, who sell those ideas, are constantly looking for an audience to air their thoughts. Merrill Lynch's team of tech analysts are so keen to peddle their points, in fact, that they hosted two mealtime bull sessions Thursday for Silicon Valley financial writers.
Over lunch at San Francisco's plush Farallon and dinner at Palo Alto's chic Spago, the Merrill sell-siders aired their views on tech stocks. Perhaps it was the wine, but the group was surprisingly forthright in talking about their various sectors. Taken with the grain of salt necessary to digest all offerings from such analysts -- whose truly fat fees come from making life easier for their investment banker brethren -- some of the insights from the Merrill crew should help guide a handful of investors.
In a group that included the oft-quoted hardware analyst (and manager of technology research) Steven Milunovich and Internet superstar Henry Blodget, the surprisingly bright light was Mark FitzGerald, Merrill's low-key semiconductor-equipment analyst. FitzGerald was strikingly gloomy on his group, made up of the companies that are to chip producers what machine-tool makers are to industrial manufacturers. The sector is in a robust recovery at the moment after suffering through a slowdown. But FitzGerald had a wake-up call for one-size-fits-all investors.
"This idea that everybody is going to recover is dead wrong," said FitzGerald. "There are a whole host of companies that will not be able to reproduce their profitability of the last up cycle," which lasted roughly from 1990 to 1998. "We've seen a run-up in orders, but we've yet to see who will be profitable."
Winners, said FitzGerald, will be the equipment companies with unique products, like Applied Materials (Nasdaq:AMAT - news) , NovellusSystems (Nasdaq:NVLS - news) and KLA-Tencor (Nasdaq:KLAC - news) , each of which is up nearly threefold from its 52-week low. But the companies FitzGerald pegged as also-rans -- Lam Research (Nasdaq:LRCX - news) , Mattson Technology (Nasdaq:MTSN - news) and FSI International (Nasdaq:FSII - news) -- are up off their lows in similar fashion. Because each faces tough competitive issues, FitzGerald said he doesn't see the latter group as keepers, especially because cost-conscious Intel (Nasdaq:INTC - news) won't carry into the next decade the purchasing power it had in the 1990s. |
