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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (35936)	7/23/2000 6:50:18 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Does anyone know where Tito is? His posts always were interesting and fun.

To: Tony Viola who wrote (35936)	7/23/2000 6:56:33 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

I had read that quote from Andy. Both AMAT and INTC management are impressive. I dont understand why some feel that cycles are always of the same duration and same intensity as before. I can understand the market being cautious re: multiples for the group given cyclical nature but when its clear we are nowhere near the end or even the peak I dont get it. SSB guy set this in motion. Merrill in rebalancing portfolio emphatically remained bullish on sector. BTB numbers are great. Hyper BTB March numbers was an aberration. Most analysts refuted SSB. What am I missing??

To: Tony Viola who wrote (35936)	7/23/2000 8:07:52 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 70976

Borrowed from the Blood thread: Prudential on BTB: SEMI’s book to bill ratio for the June came-in at robust 1.26, a slight decline over the revised May ratio of 1.28. New book to bill ratio was in-line with our and the street expectations. - Overall, orders grew by 1.1% over the prior month whereas the shipments saw 3.3% sequential increase. The overall orders growth rate declined over the May orders growth rate of 2.0%. The overall orders were $2796.1M, an increase of 79.2% over the prior year. The shipments were $2225.8M, above the last month’s shipment of $2155.2M and an increase of 72.8% over the prior year’ shipments. We have been expecting shipments to grow somewhat at a faster rate than the orders. - Front end equipment book to bill ratio increased to 1.32 (over the May’s ratio of 1.28) as wafer processing tool orders grew by 5.5% after seeing modest growth of 2.4% in May. In our view, June orders saw an acceleration as semiconductor companies (including Intel, Japanese semiconductor companies, and some of the early 300-mm pilot lines -TI, TSMC and Samsung) aggressively placed orders. We believe that July orders will be up as well. The shipments saw an increase of 2.3% over the prior month. - Backend equipment orders registered a decline of 10.3% over the prior month. In our view, backend order decline was primarily due to the decline in mixed-signal tester orders which have seen unbelievable growth in the prior months. We believe that the assembly and packaging orders grew modestly. The backend shipments grew by 5.8%, resulting in a backend book to bill ratio of 1.09. - We believe that strong orders for the front-end tools bode well for our strong buy rated stocks such as KLA-Tencor (KLAC –56 1/6, Strong Buy/SBI),Applied Materials (AMAT –83 1/8, Strong Buy), Novellus Systems (NVLS –58 9/16, Strong Buy)and Lam Research (LRCX –28 15/16, Strong Buy) whereas back-end stocks such as Teradyne (TER – 70 ½, Accumulate) & Kulicke & Soffa(KLIC – 52 ½, Accumulate) could see some weakness. We believe that the back-end order decline was principally due to the digestion in the mixed-signal tester orders by foundry test houses.