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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (35555)	6/26/2000 4:34:00 PM
From: Fred Levine	Respond to of 70976

Equipment sales fuel global chip market By Bloomberg News June 26, 2000, 12:30 p.m. PT TOKYO--Worldwide sales of equipment used to make microchips more than doubled in April, the tenth straight gain after 15 months of decline, further evidence of a recovery in the global chip market, an industry group said. Chip equipment sales soared 116 percent in April from the same month a year earlier to $3.81 billion, the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan said. Demand for equipment is rebounding as chipmakers such as Samsung Electronics, the world's largest computer memory chipmaker, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and United Microelectronics, the world's top foundry chipmakers, or third-party chipmakers, expand production capacity. The gain in April's sales also reflects increases in spending on equipment by Intel, the world's largest chipmaker; NEC, Japan's largest maker of personal computers and microchips; Texas Instruments, the No. 1 manufacturer of chips for cellular phones; and Motorola, the world's No. 2 producer of cellular phones. Orders for chip equipment are getting a boost as companies retool factories to make chips with smaller circuit feature sizes. Smaller chip feature sizes allow more information to be packed onto chips, yielding faster and smaller chips and lower power consumption. That's likely to boost the earnings of many of the world's biggest producers of microchip-making equipment, such as Applied Materials and Lam Research in the United States, ASM Lithography Holding of the Netherlands and Tokyo Electron, Nikon and Advantest in Japan. 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, creating new demand for equipment. Sony and Toshiba in March last year agreed to spend 120 billion yen ($1.12 billion) to make chips for PlayStation2, the successor to the best-selling video game player, while Nintendo is joining with IBM and Matsushita Electric Industrial to develop the successor to its Nintendo 64 game player. Chipmaking-equipment sales figures tend to lag behind order numbers by up to half a year. Copyright 2000, Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved. fred