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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (2936)	9/6/2002 9:21:07 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

S&P rates AMAT as AVOID(2 Stars) at 12......let's revisit some of these calls a year or two from now: biz.yahoo.com Q: Would you still recommend tech stocks for the long haul? A: We are presently recommending investors underweight the tech sector. We are confident that, at some point, the outlook for tech stocks will look better, with the demand for equipment to replace business tools purchased in 1999 for Y2K compliance reasons that [have now become] obsolete. Additionally, tech should prosper when the overall economy rebounds sufficiently to have new jobs expand significantly in a world where each desk increasingly comes with a PC.... The second half of 2003 and perhaps 2004 and '05 could look better. Q: Short-term outlook for KLA-Tencor (NasdaqNM:KLAC - News)? A: KLA-Tencor now is a 3-STAR [hold] recommendation at S&P.... KLA makes semiconductor equipment...very sophisticated tools that measure the yield of chips on a wafer at various stages of the wafer-manufacturing process. It serves a dozen or more submarkets in this area and dominates many of them. Its competition is generally Applied Materials (NasdaqNM:AMAT - News) and some Japanese makers, among others. We generally think of KLA as a quality name in the semiconductor-equipment group. It should do well in the next up cycle. However, in recent weeks, reports from Novellus (NasdaqNM:NVLS - News) and other front-end equipment companies have shown the pace of orders fading off. So KLA's fundamental recovery is likely to be similarly delayed. My advice would be to either wait on new purchases or else consider a strategy such as dollar-averaging your way in over several months in a stock like KLA Tencor. I might add that Applied Materials is a 2-STAR [avoid]. And Novellus Systems is a 4-STAR [accumulate]. So there are some differences in the pace of comeback and the particular valuation level as seen by our analyst [Richard Tortoriello].