I appreciate that Stitch. VECO is a great company, but it has already come a long way. In addition they have the problem that IBM yanked the distribution of their AFM and gave the distributorship to ZIGO. That should hurt VECO's bookings somewhat, and help ZIGO's bookings. Sure, VECO will try to move former IBM customers to the Digital Instruments line, but they won't be completely successful, and the addition of a new competitor always hurts a bit.
Arguably ADEX also has a lot of headroom, but they have plenty of problems of their own, including a weak BTB last quarter combined with a huge sales contraction. As a practical matter I think they would be better off selling out to ZIGO, VECO, or KLAC. Here is a graph of the relative performance of ZIGO, VECO, ADEX, and KLAC for the last year:
techstocks.com
On the other hand, ZIGO is a good company, and last quarter had a BTB above 1, and even VECO didn't do that.
Carl |
