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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (38619)	10/24/2000 10:12:41 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 70976

Testing Companies Slow Down Expansion Plan on Sluggish DRAM Sentiment October 24, 2000 (TAIPEI) -- Fears that the upstream wafer foundry industry and the DRAM manufacturing industry still may be far away from recovery have persuaded several downstream testing companies to put the brakes on plans for expansion. Several local testing companies have postponed or suspended altogether their investment projects in the third quarter, because of the uncertain future of the semiconductor industry, and have asked testing facility manufacturers to defer shipments until the coming year. Teradyne, a U.S.-based company that has won considerable control in the Taiwan industry of testing facilities for logic IC, confirmed the bad news. Teradyne's top executive said that several testing companies are now regretting their decision to expand production lines, based on a prematurely optimistic view of the industry's sentiment. According to a market watcher, previous performance had encouraged the industry to hope for a high volume of testing facility orders in the third quarter, but this did not materialize. Instead, order volume in the third quarter was much lower than in the first quarter. The run down of demand has aroused Teradyne's concern that its operation in Taiwan is unlikely to report another doubling of sales for 2000. Lin Wen-po, the chairman of Siliconware Corp., a testing company listed on the island's OTC market, was more optimistic, believing that the demand from testing companies will rebound fairly soon. The fortunes of the DRAM industry have long been expected to recover around the end of the year, and Lin pointed out that testing companies could expect to release more orders in the first quarter of 2001. (Commercial Times, Taiwan)