At the annual meeting (my transcript of it is at cymerian.com, Akins said that, as of March 1999, the production lasers installed at chipmakers was
Cymer 97%
Komatsu < 3%
Lambda Physic < 1 %
Ushio << 1%
In the latest conference call (https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=10678487), there was this exchange:
Fitzgerald: And just one last question, it's kind of a general question here, but when you look at what you guys gotta do to build out the infrastructure here, is the market large enough for one of these second players in the market to come in and kind of duplicate the global infrastructure and be able to make money at it?
Akins: Mark, that's the question that we have of course been asking ourselves for many years,and I think that it's a good assumption to say that the industry demand for a second source is going to make do with whatever distribution and/or servicing infrastructure can be put in place for that second – or third – source of lasers . We have been attempting, I think successfully so, to differentiate ourselves as a value-adding company that ties in not only to our technology development and manufacturing capability, but also to our global service infrastructure as well. And I will say that there's a growing trend that shows that when Cymer provides direct support for the laser, the overall uptime and chipmaker satisfaction are significantly higher. So we think that we've got certainly the best way to conduct the business, and it's now up to the competition to try to duplicate that.
Reading between the lines, I infer from this that the industry will give sufficient market share to the competition to make it economical for them to continue to provide a second source for lasers. What that share is remains to be seen. |
