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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Morebull who wrote (31527)	7/21/1999 2:40:00 AM
From: Jeffrey D	Respond to of 70976

Tokyo Electron reports earnings. WOW! Jeff Tokyo Electron's April-June Orders More Than Doubled on Demand From Taiwan By Peter Poole-Wilson and Miki Takeyama Tokyo Electron Says April-June Orders More Than Doubled on Year Tokyo, July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Tokyo Electron Ltd., Japan's largest maker of equipment to produce microchips, said orders beat its estimates in the April-June quarter on surging demand from contract chipmakers in Taiwan. Orders more than doubled to 89.1 billion yen ($746 million) in the April-June period, from 44.1 billion yen in the same quarter last year, said Kazuya Nanbu, manager of Tokyo Electron's investor relations department. That's 8 percent better than Tokyo Electron's target of matching the 82.8 billion yen in orders it had in the January-March quarter. Demand from contract chipmakers in Taiwan such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and United Microelectronics Corp., the world's two largest, is driving the recovery in orders. Orders for products such as equipment used to make liquid- crystal display screens are strong enough to challenge production capacity, the company said. ''Especially for LCD-making equipment, orders and inquiries are strong and we have a situation where production can't keep pace,'' said Tokyo Electron's Nanbu. Tokyo Electron, the No. 2 producer of chipmaking equipment behind Applied Materials Inc. of the U.S., had an order backlog of 120 billion yen at the end of June, 43 percent higher than the 84 billion yen total three months ago, and the highest level since the end of March 1998. The 36-year-old company is gaining as many U.S. and Japanese chipmakers such as NEC Corp. and Toshiba Corp. are increasingly consigning production of many kinds of chips to low-cost makers in Taiwan, South Korea and elsewhere, to avoid the risks and costs involved in making chips themselves. Tokyo Electron is also benefiting from a surge in demand for machines used to make LCD screens. That's the result of increased production of notebook computers, which use LCD screens, and wider adoption of LCD screens, rather than bulky cathode-ray tubes, as monitors for desktop PCs. That drove orders for LCD-making equipment to more than 15 percent of the April-June total, Nanbu said. Tokyo Electron forecasts sales will rebound 13 percent to 355 billion yen in the year through March 2000 as chipmakers worldwide spend more on equipment. The company targets earnings of 8 billion yen for the period, a more-than-fourfold recovery from the year ended March 31. Spending cuts by chipmakers such as Intel Corp. of the U.S., the world's largest, and NEC and Toshiba sent sales plummeting 31 percent and earnings 94 percent in the year ended March 31. Tokyo Electron shares, which have more than doubled so far this year in line with the recovery in orders, Monday fell 240 yen to 9,180. Yesterday was a national holiday in Japan. The following table gives figures for Tokyo Electron's orders for each quarter since the beginning of 1996. Units are in billions of yen. ************************************************************ Jan-Mar Apr-June July-Sep Oct-Dec *********************************************************** 1999 82.8 89.1 1998 25.6 44.4 30.9 40.0 1997 103.0 77.1 138.7 84.5 1996 129.0 61.0 51.0 72.0 >>