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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JSLyons who wrote (10694)	10/9/2002 11:14:42 PM
From: Q.	Respond to of 10921

My semi equip picks were not the result of a systematic effort to sort through all the stocks in the sector. I just looked briefly at a few, and found two I liked as value-stock plays, ASYT and NVLS. I didn't look in depth, and so I might be wrong about it all, but here are their two rather different stories as I saw them: I bought ASYT yesterday at 3.80 and again at 3.53, with a price/book of 0.75. It's priced as if investors are worried it'll go out of business, but it won't. They are burning cash at a rate of a few million per quarter, but they've got $132 M of working capital, so they can last quite a few years provided they don't do something really stupid. The stock would be more appealing to me if they didn't have the LT debt. I bought NVLS yesterday at 20.21, price/book 1.5. It's a much bigger company and unlike ASYT it is a consistently profitable cash-producing company, even in the darkest hours of this highly cyclical sector. Thus, the stock deserves a premium multiple. NVLS has a monstrously strong balance sheet, with no LT debt and tons of cash. If you wanted to sneak a tech stock into grandma's portfolio as a value play, this would be one to consider. Liquidation value for the company (current assets minus all liabitilities) is $8.79 per share, so with the stock at 20.8 you are buying the operations and profit-generating capability of the company for only $12 per share. The beautiful balance sheet is sullied a bit, though, by a new merger with debt-laden Speedfam/IPEC, at a cost of about 17% of Novellus' working capital. If you looked through all the stocks in the sector and made tables of multiples now vs. historical for each stock, and compared before picking, you could do better than I did. I looked at only a few. I noticed on another thread Cary said he was selling ASYT to buy ASML (price/book 1.8), so I looked briefly, and to me they look similar. Aside from being distinguished by a factor of 20 in market cap, they have a lot in common, in terms of profitability history, quality of balance sheet, and charts too. I don't like foreign companies because I prefer reading the filings of domestic companies, so I wouldn't buy ASML, but it might be right for somebody else.

To: JSLyons who wrote (10694)	2/6/2003 10:45:08 AM
From: OldAIMGuy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

Hi Jonathan, I've not had much activity with my CGNX holding for some time. CGNX is the only equip company that I own that is really related to semi-equip. It's come close to triggering a sale a couple of times since I last purchased some more shares at the beginning of August last year. Well, finally yesterday we managed to sell 5% of the position at $23.25. That represented a 47% LIFO gain on those shares. I guess it was worth the wait. Here's what my last three years of history with CGNX look like: aim-users.com Best regards, Tom