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Technology Stocks : IMPX - When Will the Dead Money Awaken? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Terf who wrote (43)	11/7/1997 7:42:00 PM
From: slob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 532

Tom, What I'm saying is that a buy-out does not make financial sense. There are very few interested in a take-over, my read is that those that might be interested are willing to sit on the side lines and pick IMP up for pennies on the dollar. It would be irresponsible IMHO for management to accept under $1.5 to $2.0 for this company. It is easy to show ways in which IMP could be ran that would make it worth at least $2 per share. Your right that the BV for the company is under $0.5 but that is a meaningless number when your talking about Fab equipment. Basically IMP has hardly purchase any new equipment in the last 2 years. At least thats my read based on their 10K. So we know that their Steppers are limiting them to about 1.0 micron feature sizes. My guess is that they use standard 1.0 micron via and contact structures (Plugs were not needed till 0.5 micron and below ). Ok so what is this sort of equipment good for? Answer : Analog and high voltage applications. In these markets their is almost no value in shrinking the gate length or width, most of the best analog processes that I know about are still 0.7 to 1.0 microns with high voltage processes often at 1.5 to 2.0 micron. What IMP needs is a really good BiCmos process with DUF isolation. They need to be selling this for about $500 per wafer. Now based on that they need a production cost of under $300 per wafer to make it worth supporting. IMP can do this and management should be made try rather than just give up. IMP was very active in the disk drive market and got their butts kicked, their problem was that TI had much deeper pockets and better high speed BiCMOS processes. Plus TI had a road map that integrated DSP functions, to do this you need to be in 0.3 micron processes. Thats how you get the digital density. IMP could see the writing on the walls so they exited these markets. They also closed their Gate-array section for the same reasons. Anyway got lots to do slob