"Straight shooter looks at chip stocks"
Posted at 2:10 a.m. PDT Monday, April 9, 2001
BY SCOTT HERHOLD
Mercury News
excerpt
>THE GOOD NEWS: To a large extent, Ragsdale thinks much of the pain has already been frankly admitted. ``You've got companies that have already seen a 25 percent reduction in revenue from the last quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2001,'' he says. ``It's hard to keep going down at that rate.''
He argues that investors have come to the cold, hard truth that no place in tech in safe. But given that, he says that the economy would have to see a much bigger meltdown to drive the semiconductor stocks substantially down (And remember, his standards are a little different than most of us: He regards 10 to 20 percent volatility in a week as normal).
This sounds a little like damning with faint praise. But in fact, Ragsdale does think it might be worth nibbling -- but only nibbling -- on some stocks. He's moved Texas Instruments (TI) to Goldman's recommended list, saying that its market in chips for wireless communications is likely to be among the first to recover.
He sees a possibility for revival with Intel, too, though he concedes that Intel has had a raft of other problems last year, including various bugs and late product introductions. And he sees promise eventually for Altera, Xilinx, LSI Logic and Latice Semiconductor.<
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