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Strategies & Market Trends : Quarter to Quarter Aggressive Growth Stocks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jack Hartmann who wrote (773)	9/22/2000 7:38:13 PM
From: Mike E.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6925

Atmel took a hit today. Buying op if you ask me (which you didn't, I realize, but, but... <g>). A write up on Atmel from Individual Investor. I've only copied the portion on ATML, but the whole article was interesting, so I've included the link to page one of it. Source: individualinvestor.com America's Fastest Growing Companies By Ben Mattlin (9/22/00) ATMEL Chips for Everything To understand how the semiconductor industry is changing, just listen. The cacophony of buzzing, beeping, ditty-playing cellular phones filling the air signals a shift from a personal-computer-centered market, and it's music to the ears of chipmakers whose specialized products are indispensable to the manufacture of wireless devices. Atmel (NASDAQ: ATML - Quotes, News, Boards) a semiconductor company that gets half its revenue from sales of chips for cell phones, is exploiting the trend to post ringing revenue and profit growth. Atmel's products, some 20% of which end up in PCs, tend to have odd names and singular functions. About half come under the umbrella of nonvolatile memory circuits, which hold information even when the power to an electronic device is turned off. These include flash memory, used to remember basic cell-phone data, and electrically erasable programmable memory--or EEPROM--which handles such reprogrammable functions as speed-dialing and microwave-oven cooking time. Then there are application-specific integrated circuits, essential for transmitting mobile phone signals, and programmable logic devices and microcontrollers, both of which are used in almost every type of electronic system. "Atmel is so diversified, it really has no direct competitors," says Chase H&Q technology analyst Sudeep Balain. Not many companies compete with Atmel's growth rate, either. Sales in 1999 rose nearly 20%, to $1.3 billion, and grew 48% year over year in this year's first quarter. Net income for the quarter jumped 151% and earnings per share reached $0.19, a 111% gain over the $0.09 per share posted in the first quarter of 1999. And this year's big advance is no anomaly, according to Balain, who predicts earnings per share will hit $0.34 by the first quarter of next year. For all of 2000, Balain says, Atmel should post a per-share profit of $1, nearly triple last year's $0.35, and ought to see an additional 60% advance in 2001. "Atmel's biggest customers tell us that the company is booking and shipping a significantly larger share of high-density flash products that go into cell phones, which means bigger gross margins," says Balain. As a result, he recently upgraded his recommendation on the stock to a strong buy. Competition in the market for digital subscriber lines, or DSLs, is intense. The technology provides high-speed Internet access through copper telephone lines, and hundreds of companies, from semiconductor manufacturers to Baby Bells, are jockeying for a piece of the action. Global sales of DSL microchips alone should amount to $500 million this year and double that next.