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

To: Mephisto who wrote (33454)	12/9/1999 1:25:00 PM
From: gugie	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 70976

re: AMAT buying a flat panel display company. Actually, Applied had a joint venture with Komatsu to produce flat panel display capital equipment. Just recently AMAT bought out Komatsu's share and owns it outright as a subsidiary. The technology is similar to chip making, with the exception that instead of shrinking chip features, more pixels are being added onto larger substrates, therefore the density of pixels is relatively constant. Also, the displays are much more of a commodity market than chips are, with the exception of most types of memory. Those are the two main differences between the industries. Perhaps flat panel display demand is more cyclical than chips as a whole. Anyone have any data or comments on that?