Shareholder meeting --- my stale notes...
I too attended the meeting last Friday, but you provided a great summary before I could
find time to write up my own notes. (Drove to Reno for the weekend to get any gambling
urges out of my system.) Agree very positive meeting. Listening to Wilf is always a
treat. Back when the meetings were in Milpitas I usually showed up.
I'll vouch for the accuracy of your note-taking anytime. There's nothing of substance
for me to add. My estimate of the attendance was about 130 people, of which maybe
one third were LSI employees. Their ten displays and demo's around the back of the
room: SGI workstation, HP Scanjet 5200C, Xerox 265 digital copier, Sun Ultra
workstation, Metastore workgroup storage system, PCI RAID system, PlayStation 2,
L6402X single chip DVD decoder, DCAM 103 single chip image processor, and
single chip CDMA baseband processor; plus knowledgeable employees to explain it all.
Wilf's discussion of the industry and LSI highlights did last exactly 45 minutes. The
question and answer session went on another 45 minutes.
My understanding of Gresham remarks is that $1 billion has been spent so far, and the
$4 billon number referred to the total after the "next few years". Unclear whether that
includes any work on the additional three fabs that they have room for. I don't know
where Wilf got the idea that 320 acres was 10 percent of Gresham. Maybe he meant
10% of the industrial acreage.
( reference-- ci.gresham.or.us , Gresham area is
22.5 square miles = 14400 acres, 4th most populous city in Oregon.)
Comment that the next two or three years should be very good -- last time I heard Wilf
being this confident of the future was the annual meeting in 1992 when he told a
disgruntled shareholder to just hang on for a couple more years to be richly rewarded.
20-fold appreciation followed in the next 40 months. LSI appears to me to be even better
positioned this time around.
The Japan fab is 6-inch wafers at 0.35 micron, high volume. They thought they could
shut it down by now, but demand is still strong. Wilf said they would close it maybe
in fourth quarter. Also said they are still undecided whether next fab in Gresham will be
8-inch or 12-inch; here's where the statement about wanting to be tenth to adopt 12-inch
came in. A three minute video about the Gresham plant was shown. The figure of
65,000 square feet was given; I guess that's the cleanroom area. Page 17 of the 10-K
gives Gresham area as 532,400 sq ft over 3 buildings. Plenty of impressive equipment,
but the only piece I could identify was a Semitool oven. The locality was referred to as
"Silicon Forest".
Plenty more notes, but I'll quit here. My bottom line feeling is to keep all my current
shares as a core position (longterm tax-wise), and grab more on any market downturn
for those technical trades that so many on this thread are fond of. Another 6 months
and LSI may overtake Cisco as my largest holding; it's getting to be a close race. |
