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

To: Return to Sender who wrote (62242)	3/21/2002 10:09:25 PM
From: Gottfried	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

RtS, at the stockholders meeting this morning there was no swagger - it was bland. But action [the split] speaks louder than words. They must be very confident now and this is their non-verbal way to express it. Nobody can sue for a stock split, either. :) Of course their continually increasing R&D spending bespeaks confidence, too. [Yeah, I finally read the 10k today. It even explains why they have more cash now than ever, almost $5B] Gottfried

To: Return to Sender who wrote (62242)	3/21/2002 11:03:48 PM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

AMAT is the #1 company in making chips Chips are expected to go from their current 0.7% GWP to 5.3% of GWP in not too many years. (GWP = Gross World Product) It doesn't matter if China or Kenya makes the chips with cheap labor, they still need the equipment that AMAT makes. It doesn't matter if Cisco or Juniper uses Altera or Xilinx chips as the chips will be built on AMAT equipment. I would not expect many other companies are better positioned to prosper in the long run. Other comparisons are GE and Citigroup but they are already big and well known. The funny part is many arm chair analysts still don't have a clue about the business and talk of the stock as over valued and spending too much cash .... at the bottom of the cycle. This is still a feast of famon(sp?) business so only those that under stand the cycle will be buyers when low... trouble this time is it didn't get low enough for some of us to add to positions are others are catching on. Barrier to entry.. too high now to even enter. The only people that MIGHT have a shot at over taking AMAT would be if NVLS and LRCX merge and then get a few other companies... but they could make plenty of money in the areas they are in anyway and may not need to merge. Splits are weird. It would be interesting to hear why THEY thought now is a good time... Kirk