FSII - The Worst is Over? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : FSII - The Worst is Over?

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To: Sparky65 who wrote (1097)	6/26/1997 6:14:00 PM
From: Running Bull	of 2754

I own both FSII and SMTL. I bought them both because they both seem to be poised to grow rapidly if the equipment orders start flowing. I think that it is easy to be misled by the book to bill numbers. What has happened is that bookings were off so much a year ago that that dip is showing up in shipments finally (these companies have a time response of 6-9 months) showing up. So bookings turn up a little while shipements are still declining and eueka!! the book to bill is above one. I don't think the big orders have started yet. And since leadtimes are probably way down across the industry because of the slowdown, there is no big pull by users to order ahead since they can get machines in relatively short periods of time. Also, there has been a lot of capacity added in the industry. And improved technologies that have come on the scene. So for both these companies, the jury is still out and we won't know until the order faucet really turns on. If we see announcements out of the competitors and not out of FSI or Semitool, we will know we have bought turkeys. If the flood spills our way, we will wonder why we didn't buy more. One other little tidbit about the common business to these companies which is the cleaning business. Cleaning is done is wafer fabs only because the guy getting the wafers from the previous process step doesn't trust the guy who sent them to him. Or because the prior process didn't work as well as it should have. In a perfect process world, you shouldn't have to clean wafers because they should never be dirty. So one way the process engineers deal with this is to use clustered processes ( this is what AMAT preaches). If your wafers just go into a cluster and have a bunch of processes done in a vacuum and then come out clean, you shouldn't have to clean them again. So as cluster processes proliferate, we may see the number of cleaning steps diminish. It could happen. Then again it may not. It might turn out to be like the paperless office.

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