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

To: runes who wrote (6422)	7/9/2003 11:41:29 AM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

But speaking of HP, I see that A(gilent) is motoring along quite nicely. Got any words of wisdom on those components of old HP? I own it and have been buying some as I sold some of my HP to further diversify when they split. Both went down.... I have been buying and selling around a core position in Agilent for some time now with success. I've encouraged Don Wennerstom ( Subject 37144 )to included Agilent in his sox and semicapx tables for some time since Agilent is both a semi company and a capx company in that it sells semiconductors and testers and it has much better "value parameters" than most others he follows. I'm not sure why it gets such a low multiple compared to similar companies as pure plays other than it is probably not well understood so avoided. They have had huge problems and the Fiber Optics group that I with a handful of folks helped start where we recruited from colleges, Bell Labs, etc. back in the early 1980's and grew into a huge division that has pretty much been crushed and half or more were laid off the past year or two. I could comment on what I think their problems were, but I still think they have great folks who can work through the problems to greatness once again. for example, it is really hard to make money selling NEW test instruments that costs many tens of thousands when MOST your customers go bankrupt and sell their bit error rate testers and scopes on the grey market. Actually, I think one of their problems is jobs to define new products went to marketing stars rather than folks like me who wanted the job but were good technical contributors and were kept doing designs. I eventually left to define stuff for the internet and try to make a profitable business there. I think Maxim avoids this problem in that their products are defined by exceptional engineers with great design experience who work WITH good marketing people. Products are released that engineers want to design in rather than marketing thinks will be a big hit. Now Agilent did have a great guy defining new products when I left (optics for optical mouse) who is now a division manager for the division his product idea grew into. I hope his old function was replaced by someone with similar skills.