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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (34516)	3/8/2000 9:42:00 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Brian, >Worldwide Semiconductor Sales Grow 32.9% from January 1999; January Sales Provide Solid Outlook for 2000 Let the good times roll. Little did I know when I bought companies like AMAT and LSI that they would produce returns something like that of the inuts in 1998 (or whenever that was). Cycle wise, looking good through this year, probably next and some are saying through 2002. We'll keep an eye on it Tony

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (34516)	3/8/2000 10:41:00 AM
From: Gottfried	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Brian, thanks for the SIA report! I've been looking for it and it is not posted on the SIA site yet. Gottfried

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (34516)	3/8/2000 10:43:00 AM
From: Terry D	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Food for Thought from Bear Investor awareness week- Air pockets in the quarter We hope that investors have paid attention to the fact that the two largest front end equipment makers in the U.S., Applied Materials and Lam Research will both experience a loss of productivity due to transitions in their software systems used in manufacturing. Applied went through these "growing pains" a number of weeks ago and now Lam is scheduled to shut down production for a week for the switch over to an Oracle system. In the long run these are terrific advances for companies in the semiconductor equipment industry and should boost the financial performance and ability to withstand the cyclicality, but in the near term they can be a pain. A mathematical certainty - Just as the book to bill goes up, so must it come down. The book to bill is not sustainable as is. Even though business is great , and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future, shipments will start to catch up to orders (even with some production issues this quarter). DRAM pricing -"falls in the spring and springs in the fall" Lest everybody forget we are heading into the normally seasonally weak springtime for not only DRAM but semiconductors in general. So far, even though DRAM has fallen, it seems to be resistant to the loss leader pricing we saw this time last year. The reality is that DRAM manufacturers are still making money. Lets not get back into the bad habit of using the spot price of DRAM as an indicator for the semiconductor equipment stocks, its bad enough micron still trades like that. At least investors have figured out that the correlation coefficient is a lot less than one to one. Tech stock cyclicality - Aside from the semiconductor equipment industry being cyclical, tech stocks themselves have had a cyclical past. I have lived through couple of "cyclical" downturns in tech stocks that got quite ugly. So even though tech can "do no wrong" today, and nothing else is working there have been times in the past when tech was well out of favor. So far though, like the equipment industry, it seems to be having a good run..