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To: Dave B who wrote (72990)	5/15/2001 6:58:03 PM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 93625

Hynix may end up with foreign investors By Jack Robertson, EBN May 15, 2001 (3:15 PM) URL: siliconstrategies.com Hynix Semiconductor Co. (formerly Hyundai Electronics Industries Co.) could end up with one or more foreign investors owning a minority equity share as part of a $1.5 billion overseas financing effort launched Tuesday. Farhad Tabrizi, vice president of worldwide marketing, told EBN that the foreign solicitation involves public and private stock sales and convertible bonds. With Hynix stock now selling for as low as the equivalent of $4 a share on the Korean Stock Exchange, large investors in the new equity issues could end up with a significant minority interest, he agreed. "With 500 million outstanding shares, the present Hynix valuation is about $2 billion, making this a big investment attraction," he said. Tabrizi confirmed industry reports that Newbridge Capital Ltd. was "only one of many investment groups" that has been talking with Hynix about an equity investment. He declined to comment that talks with Newbridge may have broken off. He said Hynix was not discussing any investments from other semiconductor companies. "We might consider a chip company that would make a good strategic match with our capabilities," he said, adding that Hynix had no intention of yielding any management control over the company. As part of its restructuring to divest itself from the parent Hyundai Group, Hynix has been engaged for nearly a year in selling off about $1 billion in shares the company owns in other Hyundai affiliates, including Hyundai Investment Trust, Hyundai Logistics, and Image Quest. Three Hyundai Group affiliates also own 19.2% of the semiconductor firm and are committed to sell that stock by the end of the year. Financial sources said because of the current low Hynix stock price, the other Hyundai affiliates are waiting until the shares increase in value. The foreign cash solicitation follows a $4 billion refinancing of Hynix debt by domestic banks and creditors. Most of the funds are being used to refinance short term bonds that are maturing this year and causing a major financial crunch for the Korean firm. Tabrizi said after the financial restructuring is completed, Hynix hopes to reduce its outstanding debt to $5.8 billion by the end of the year. Debt is currently at $6.5 billion, which is down from a high of more than $9 billion only a year ago. The executive said Hynix will also use cash flow and some of the financing proceeds for capital investment, which is slated to increase to $1.2 billion next from $700 million this year. He said capex will mainly go to upgrading existing fabs, but will include the firm's first 300-mm wafer fab to be built in Korea, slated for production in 2003. "We know the semiconductor market is going to recover, and Hynix has one of the largest leading edge production capacities (350,000 8-inch equivalent wafers a month) in the industry. Almost half of this capacity is at 0.18-micron technology or smaller density," he said. Hynix has also reorganized its board of directors, cutting the size to 10 members, with seven of these external directors. James Huzy, an American, and president of Arbor Co., was elected as one of the first foreign board members for the Korean firm.

To: Dave B who wrote (72990)	5/15/2001 7:18:34 PM
From: SBHX	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Dave, Here's what I think could be interesting things with the P4-DDR match. If the P4 was truly designed for an DRDRAM system, it would not have 64pins for data. I see the pins D0#-D63# in the P4 datasheet, and that the FSB is actually a quad-pumped 100MHz bus. ftp://download.intel.com/design/Pentium4/datashts/24919803.pdf By just looking at this, my guess is that the memory controller and DDR should be running at 200MHz. That way, it should match the FSB requirements of the P4, and avoid the serializing/deserializing needs of DRDRAM. But 5ns DDR is still expensive and can be only be found largely on graphics boards today. Back to RDRAM, this serializing/deserializing step is probably adding to the latency of the P4 to drdram, but a quad-channel PC800 drdram that now has 64bits of data seems on the surface to avoid this serializing step, might be interesting, though the memory would then be running at twice the speed of the CPU's ability to take data. This is vast oversimplification of a difficult issue, and by no means do I imply that I know what is involved to make it all work. It's just electronic etchings. Perhaps the real problem is that most people don't need anything faster than PC133, but that would be sacrilege. No idea how it will play out either. If I was INTC, I'd be very worried about the Via C3. SbH