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Technology Stocks : Amkor Technology Inc (AMKR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tech101 who wrote (958)	11/12/2001 5:54:04 PM
From: Artslaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1056

Of course DRAM prices are bottoming--DRAM is virtually free! Can't drop below zero. . . Anyway, if these forecasters were any good, they would have all retired wealthy from their previous predictions! Here's a recent cool-sounding headline: Amkor Starts Producing Saw-Singulated QFN Packages biz.yahoo.com Steve

To: tech101 who wrote (958)	11/13/2001 8:15:10 AM
From: Jim Oravetz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1056

Is It Time to Cash in Your Chips? By ERIC J. SAVITZ Barrons article, Sat Nov. 10th Well, that settles it. We're heading for a big-time recovery in chip demand. It says so, right here in the latest forecast from the Semiconductor Industry Association. The trade group expects chip sales will finish this year down a whopping 31%, but that sales will rebound to show 6% growth in 2002, followed by 21% gains in both 2003 and 2004. Woo-hoo! Just like old times. Alas, the SIA's track record for predicting demand is a little, uh, unreliable. Care to guess what the SIA had predicted one year ago for 2001? Would you believe 22% growth? In other words, they whiffed big time, which as it happens is not infrequently the case with the SIA's forecasting. But let's not be too hard on them; the truth is, forecasting chip demand is a chancy business at best. Terry Ragsdale, a semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs, hesitates to provide projections for more than a quarter or two. Press him, and he'll predict a flat year for 2002. snip.... businessweek.com For Memory Chips, a Time to Forget With too much capacity still on-line, the most popular chips are selling below cost. The upshot: Shakeout ahead Semiconductor companies have all gotten whacked this year, but none harder than producers of memory chips. Prices of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips, used to store data on personal computers, fell 80% in 2001, vs. a falloff of only about one-third for the overall chip market. With memory chips now often selling below cost, Boise (Idaho)-based Micron Technology, the only major U.S. memory-chip producer, recorded a net loss of $521 million for fiscal 2001 ended Aug. 30 -- a huge downturn, considering the company earned $1.55 billion the year before. snip... Jim