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

To: Xpiderman who wrote (32937)	10/25/1999 4:19:00 AM
From: SMALL FRY	Respond to of 70976

Not sure if this has been posted: bloomberg.com Technology News Mon, 25 Oct 1999, 4:08am EDT Worldwide Chip Equipment Sales Rose in August for the 2nd Straight Month By Peter Poole-Wilson and Chiharu Kamimura World Chip Equipment Sales Rose in August; 2nd Straight Month Tokyo, Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Worldwide sales of equipment used to make microchips surged 74 percent in August, the second straight gain after 15 months of decline, supplying further evidence of recovery in the global chip market. Chip equipment sales rose 74 percent in August from the same month a year earlier to $1.938 billion, the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan said. Demand is rising again thanks to gains in capital spending at Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest computer memory chipmaker, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and United Microelectronics Corp. -- the world's top foundry chipmakers, or producers of custom-designed semiconductors. The gain in August's sales also reflects increases in spending on equipment by Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, Motorola Inc., the world's No. 2 producer of cellular phones, and Texas Instruments Inc., the No. 1 manufacturer of chips for cellular phones. Orders for chip equipment are getting a boost as companies retool factories to make chips with smaller circuit feature sizes, allowing more information to be packed onto chips. In addition, chipmakers and home video game makers are teaming up to develop and make chips for future generations of video games and digital household electronics. Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. in March agreed to spend 120 billion yen ($1.14 billion) to make chips for PlayStation 2, the successor to the best-selling video game player, while Nintendo Co. is joining with International Business Machines Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. to develop the successor to its Nintendo 64 game player. That's set to propel the earnings of many of the world's biggest producers of microchip-making equipment, such as Applied Materials Inc. and Lam Research Corp. in the U.S., ASM Lithography Holding NV of the Netherlands and Tokyo Electron Ltd., Nikon Corp. and Advantest Corp. in Japan. Chipmaking-equipment sales figures tend to lag order numbers by up to half a year. The following table breaks down world chipmaking-equipment sales by machinery category. Units are millions of dollars. The percentage changes compare cumulative totals for the April-August 1999 period with the same period a year earlier. ********************************************************* Equipment August April-August Cumul. Sales Y-o-Y Change ******************************************************* Mask/Reticle Man. Equip. 20.570 -44.4% Wafer Man. Equip. 11.822 -15.1% Wafer Processing Equip. 1,244.044 +11.1% Assembly Equipment 172.299 +36.4% Inspection Equip. 432.608 +5.6% Related Equipment 56.536 -6.6% ******************************************************* TOTAL 1,938.238 +8.5% *********************************************************