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

To: Lucky L who wrote (31933)	8/14/1999 2:16:00 PM
From: marc henschke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

This analysis from Needham is absolute horse***t. After AMAT has increased its bookings from $600 million to $1.5 billion over the last few quarters, we're told that the rate of sequential bookings growth will slow. Gee, really? And here we all thought that AMAT would have $5 billion in bookings over the next few quarters. Silly us. Of course there is going to a leveling off of bookings growth, but the point is that this leveling off will nonetheless represent a very high rate of bookings at which the company is raking in big profits. That ought to carry us through to the start of 300mm bookings in another year or so, which will represent the biggest customer orders ever received in the history of the equipment industry. In addition to pointing out the obvious (and the irrelevant), Needham and others ask us to consider the possibility that orders "may" slow for a quarter or two from Taiwan while recent purchases are digested, but then rapidly accelerate thereafter. Again, so what? Is this a suggestion that we attempt to time the market and bounce in and out of AMAT's stock on a quarter by quarter basis based on idle speculation and guesswork about what the precise timing of Taiwanese purchases will be? Needham itself couldn't do that successfully, much less the small uninformed investor who sits out there in the market waiting to get sandbagged by the type of drivel that Needham recently put out. You be the judge. Every scrap of news coming out of the semiconductor industry is excellent. Foundaries are running at overcapacity. Our leading indicator stocks like INTC and MU are cruising toward 52 week if not all-time highs. 300mm and copper are back on track. We're going to get an excellent conference call on August 17, and a big-time technology rally in the fall. Is this the time to be shaving $10 per share off of AMAT's stock price heading into earnings? The question is not if, but how big, a gap-up opening we'll see next Wednesday.