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

To: Lone Star who wrote (34887)	4/18/2000 4:52:00 PM
From: Lone Star	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Oh, yeah, it's earnings season and things look almost too good. If we're ever going to get the fluff and margin guys out of this market we'd better do it quick! Hmm... Anyway, check this out. Some earnings -after the bell ...IBM..TER..AOL.... IBM beats Street in 1Q International Business Machines Corp. reported a first-quarter profit of 83 cents per share Tuesday, easily beating Wall Street estimates, but revenue dropped 5 percent as Big Blue's big corporate customers delayed purchases because of Y2K-related worries. 16:08 [IBM] IBM Q1 EARNS 83 CENTS VS. 78 CENTS FIRST CALL ESTIMATE 16:05 [TER] TERADYNE Q1 FIRST CALL ESTIMATE 52 CENTS 16:04 [TER] TERADYNE Q1 EARNS 60 CENTS VS. 10 CENTS YR. AGO QTR 16:36 [AOL] AOL Q3 REVENUE $1.84 BLN VS. $1.25 BLN 16:35 [QCOM] QUALCOMM Q2 REVENUE UP 16% TO TO $649 MLN VS. $558 MLN YEAR AGO 16:35 [AOL] AOL IN Q3 ADDS 1.7 MLN NEW MEMBERS TO HIT TOTAL OF 22.2 MLN 16:35 [QCOM] QUALCOMM Q2 EARNS 26 CENTS PRO FORMA VS. 18 CENTS YEAR AGO 16:31 [AOL] AMERICA ONLINE Q3 EARNS 11 CENTS VS. FIRST CALL ESTIMATE 9 CENTS 16:26 [BRCM] BROADCOM Q1 EARNS 18 CENTS VS. FIRST CALL EARNS ESTIMATE 16 CENTS YR. AGO QTR

To: Lone Star who wrote (34887)	4/19/2000 12:44:00 PM
From: Dr. Mitchell R. White	Respond to of 70976

Tool and fab counting is only part of the game, and unfortunately, it didn't give insight in time to help with the last two downturns. I remember attending a luncheon in 1997 where the prediction, based on tool counts, was that we were 190 fabs short of demand worldwide! The consequent prediction was that there would be no chip glut for 3-4 years, because it would take that long to get enough tools running. Didn't happen. We saw all the chip makers push to get their next shrink out, and guess what, we were over-capacity by 50 fabs or so! In six months. And then we all caught the 'flu. <sigh> So, if the tool and fab count predicts 2006 for the next over-supply, I'd confidently cut that in half from here and say late 2003 or early 2004. Would be nice to be proven incorrect on this one, but it would require a fundamental change in the demand model, probably combined with a different industry-wide build-out projection. One of the great Prediction Confounders is: This industry can turn on a dime (and give you change) on a chip design and its implementation, but it still takes years to build new facilities. If facilities could be built and populated on a similar time frame, say 6 months start-to-finish, then we would see a major damping of the swings. I'm not gonna hold my breath.... Mitch