Teri, RE: "why the long silence"
When you are a small company with a nice fat market cap based on spectacular growth and your customers are all much bigger than you are, even though you presently face little or no competition, you do not wish to endanger the customer relationship by disclosing the potential problem. You hope, instead, that the customer will disclose the problem, thus taking you off the hotseat casused by your partial disclosure, which was hardly avoidable given the circumstances. However, given that the customer is probably Japanese, and the disclosure obligations are not as strict there, CYMI may remain on the hotseat for a bit longer, until the market determines who is pushing out or cancelling orders.
Please note the following from CYMI S-1/A (4/3/97):
"The Company believes that semiconductor manufacturers are currently
developing capability for pilot production of 0.25um devices. The Company also believes that demand for its excimer lasers for DUV photolithography tools is currently being driven by the efforts to develop such capability. Once semiconductor manufacturers have acquired such capability, the company believes that they will not invest in DUV photolithography tools to expand their capacity to manufacture 0.25um devices until such time as their sales forecasts justify such investment. As a result, the Company believes that once current demand is satisfied, the Company's revenues could flatten or even decline in future periods before resuming growth in response to future demand, if any."
I believe we may be experiencing the first "flattening" CYMI referred to above.
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