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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (6441)	7/11/2003 8:49:49 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 25522

DRAM Bulletin: iSuppli reluctant to declare a memory recovery By Nam Hyung Kim Semiconductor Business News 07/11/2003, 1:00 AM ET Nam Hyung Kim is a senior analyst with iSuppli Corp., a market research firm. Global spot market prices for Double Data Rate (DDR) DRAM are rising once again, but this time the increases are being driven by a seasonal demand pick-up, unlike the purely speculation-driven rallies of recent months. However, negative factors that continue to plague the market are prompting iSuppli Corp. to hesitate before declaring the start of a broad-based DRAM recovery. U.S. memory spot market pricing for the most popular DRAMs--256Mbit DDR266 and DDR333 SDRAM--increased by 3 to 4 percent this week. Pricing for the commodity 256Mbit SDRAM and the nascent DDR400 SDRAM declined slightly. Asian spot market prices increased even more for DDR266 due to rising demand from China and other parts of Asia. The Chinese market is rapidly converting to DDR266 in place of SDRAM, which was the mainstream DRAM in PCs sold in that country up until early 2003. The increase in DDR sales in China is an encouraging sign for the DRAM industry. The rise appears to have been spurred by real end-demand for PCs, something the industry has been anxiously awaiting all year. There's one caveat in this positive sign, however: the rise in PC demand appears to be tied to normal seasonality, rather than to some massive increase in demand. Following the resolution of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis, the seasonal sales pattern for PCs and motherboards in China and Asia has reasserted itself. There are other encouraging signs in the market. The number of spot market DRAM transactions has increased, indicating that momentum is building. Furthermore, DRAM suppliers are maintaining lean inventories, and some manufacturers are suffering quality problems that have cut yields and prevented them from shipping existing stockpiles to PC OEMs. The lean inventories and reduced shipments have helped prop up prices and stretch out lead times. However, iSuppli believes there still are some fundamental negatives that need to be resolved before the DRAM market can recover in earnest. First of all, despite some constraints, the DRAM market remains fundamentally oversupplied. Second, recent spot price rallies were prompted mainly by an increased number of transactions among spot-market traders. This buying activity has been fueled by optimism about a recovery in the second half, and not by actual end-application demand. Thus, the recent previous price rallies have been built on a shaky foundation. Third, high-speed DDR333/400 SDRAM parts carry too large a premium compared to DDR266 in the spot market"unlike the contract market. This means DDR333/400 prices could fall and reduce their gap with DDR266. Finally, PC OEM demand has not increased significantly beyond normal seasonality so far. iSuppli believes that there still is a high probability of price adjustments in July because the fundamental oversupply condition in the market has not changed. Despite this, iSuppli continues to believe that a recovery in PC and DRAM demand will occur this year. iSuppli's present forecast for PC unit shipments calls for 10 percent growth in 2003. This will generate double-digit percentage growth in DRAM sales for the year, as iSuppli has been predicting since early 2003. Positive economic signals are giving iSuppli confidence that this growth forecast can be realized. However, it's still too early to declare that the market is in a recovery mode. iSuppli still believes that spot prices will experience some adjustment before they gain momentum in July. iSuppli will continue to monitor the market to see when the inflection point occurs. n Further information on the DRAM market is available in Kim's Q2 2003 DRAM Market Update report from iSuppli's Standard Semiconductors, DRAM service. Contact him at nkim@isuppli.com

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (6441)	7/11/2003 1:52:46 PM
From: Jong Hyun Yoo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

New CEO is right on track with his clean up of company organizational structures. I never understood why there were so many layers of managers at AMAT. In certain technology groups, there were more managers than engineers. Some managers had no engineers underneath them and some engineers were assigned to more than one managers.. what a chaos !! I wholeheartedly agree with what new CEO is doing. He needs to finish re-organization ASAP, however as continuous reshuffling of management team can distract focused efforts of product developement.