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

To: Gottfried who wrote (32646)	9/29/1999 9:09:00 AM
From: Duker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Morgan on the Quake & Growth ... see especially last paragraph ... does he mean $10-12bn in Revenues or Market Cap?<g> dowjones.wsj.com SHANGHAI (Dow Jones)--Most Taiwanese customers of Applied Materials Inc. (AMAT), a global maker of semiconductor chip-making equipment, have survived last week's deadly earthquake intact, according to Applied Materials Chief Executive James Morgan. "We've flown in specialists from the U.S. and elsewhere to take a look, and it looks like our (customers') factories are in pretty good shape," Morgan told Dow Jones Newswires on Wednesday. As a result, the Santa Clara, Calif. firm doesn't expect to limit any start-up of Taiwan-based production. "We should get a better sense of the situation early next week," Morgan said. Many semiconductor factories, including those that use Applied Materials' equipment and services, shut down last week after the Sept. 21 earthquake struck Taiwan. The quake killed more than 2,000 people. No employees were killed, Morgan said, and the quake had a "limited impact" on an Applied Materials technology center located in Taiwan. Speaking on the sidelines of the Fortune Global Forum conference, Morgan forecast that semiconductor production worldwide would jump from $131 billion in 1998 to $300 billion by 2003. Semiconductor production revenue in Asia, excluding Japan, is expected to grow by more than 23% by 2003, while production revenue in Japan should by grow more than 10% during that time, Morgan said. Growing Internet use is propelling this growth and the popularity of consumer products such as cell phones and videogame controllers, Morgan said. Last year's global glut of semiconductor capacity appears to have been reduced, he said, resulting in strengthening chip prices. Indeed, spot market prices for the mainstream 64-megabit DRAM's (dynamic random access memory chips) rose to about $15 per unit recently, after hovering around $4 earlier this year. Morgan refused to predict where DRAM prices would go, and instead offered predictions for Applied Materials growth. "We expect to be a $10 billion to $12 billion company by 2003," Morgan said. Company sales totaled $4 billion in fiscal 1998, and should hit $4.6 billion in fiscal 1999, he said. More than half the company's sales worldwide are in Asia.