>>I'm not saying that bookings are guaranteed to recover lost ground within any
specified period of time. I don't think it's necessary to know how fast the recovery
will be, only that we are in a recovery.<<
I agree with you here. Your earlier post seemed to imply that the *rate* of recovery was important, and likely to be comparable to 1997.
>><<As I've been saying for months, this downturn is really the *extension* of 1997,
not the successor.>>
That may be true for the DRAM industry, but when equipment bookings double
over a fourteen month period, as they did from Sept. 96 to Nov. 97, it's hard to
think of that as a mere blip.<<
You're missing my point. The rapid recovery of bookings from 96-97 is part of the reason *why* the 1998 downturn was so severe, and is part of the reason why excess capacity is still overhanging the industry. (And, incidentally, a lot of those bookings were subsequently cancelled or pushed out, and never appeared as actual revenue.)
>>The
equipment companies have to take the orders when they can get them, and the
investors have to take the profits when they can get them, without worrying about
whether the industry is achieving some mythical nirvana model of sustained, steady
growth.<<
No argument there, especially since previous claims that the industry had reached nirvana have proven to be unfounded. My worry is that present equipment stock prices reflect the nirvana scenario, not the reality.
Katherine |
