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

To: roly who wrote (10056)	10/30/1997 12:18:00 PM
From: Kumar Nathan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Roly: I expect current weakness at SEA will be viewed as an opportunity for expansion by US companies. Right now market is PC Market is booming and there is no slowness in sight. SEA countries has skilled workforce. I see WDC and Quantum kind of world beefing up production and assembly facilities. I view this currency crisis as a positive factor for PC and chip industries. Your assembling and packaging and testing cost will be very low ( These cost constitutes close to 45% of chip cost). The fact that I did not analyse is the value of consumption and production from that region. That is how much semiconductor components they consume and how much they produce. Also the significance of consumption towards worldwide consumption. IMO if we do a real grunt work on this, it will be apparent that this can be viewed as an opportunity. Regarding AMAT, All business units #s are high. My research suggests that the quarterly sales will be record high. Backlog will be very high. The focus of this conf. call will be focused on how they are going to hire people and how they are able to meet their future sales. That is a concerning factor. Building and populating of new Apps lab(i.e., Bldg 3 ) is going at a rapid pace. Capital in terms of new tools is being invested as their is no tommorrow. AMAT will do such kind of things only when they expect a lot of demos and marathon runs. That is they will do only when the customer traffic is high. Their Korean Apps lab is also going very strong. Separately, AKTs business is growing very fast. AKTs plasma technology is viewed as the darling for DTV (Digital TV or High Definition TV) application. Currently, the guy who runs AKT is extremely effective guy. His name is H.Neff. He is too good. Therefore watchout for nice contribution from AKT towards AMATs bottom line. Regards Kumar.