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To: Carl R. who wrote (1241)	6/9/1999 10:01:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1279

why aren't they seeing dramatic sales increases? Carl, Hopefully someone who understands the Mask business better than I will cut in, and give us both the answer. I would speculate that Mask sets last a relatively long time; that those outsourcing are having financial difficulty; probably made sure they had current set of masks before the deal. i.e. - there may be a slight delay between the sale and the requirement for more masks. The above sounds a lot like nonsense to me as I believe that chip designs are constantly being improved. If not, the company dies. Looking forward to a believable reason, Ian.

To: Carl R. who wrote (1241)	6/12/1999 2:13:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1279

But if the merchant mask makers are buying these shops, why aren't they seeing dramatic sales increases? My hypothesis is that the captive mask shops have always had large amounts of excess capacity and this is part of the reason they are being sold to the merchant vendors. But as the merchant vendors take over the shops it doesn't decrease the excess capacity and thus although volume goes up pricing gets softer and offsets the increasing volume. It would be interesting to know how many masks DPMI makes for each dimension. Clark