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

To: greg nus who wrote (13714)	12/21/1997 7:14:00 AM
From: SVogel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

No expert here on what makes up the capital budget for Korean chip manufacturers, but if they are cutting back by 20-30% or so they still have 70-80% of their budget left and it makes sense to invest in whatever it would take to be more productive. To build out more chips at less cost. AMAT as the #1 supplier in the world is best positioned to deliver the upgraded .25-mm and even the .18-mm equipment (for longer term competitiveness) the Koreans, Japanese. Scots, whoever, need to achieve higher productivity levels. The Asian mess is clearly an opportunity for AMAT to gain a larger world market share before it all ends. By the time the entire SEMI segment gets back on its feet, AMAT will be even more dominant than it is today and will reap the benefit in future sales opportunities of .18-mm, .15mm equipment and beyond. Just a hazardous guess. Steve

To: greg nus who wrote (13714)	12/21/1997 11:47:00 AM
From: Tito L. Nisperos Jr.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Greg, I agree with you, the Korean companies will take advantage of the situation to produce more in areas where labor is cheaper and export more to get as many dollars they can get; expansion in the U.S. for instance, where labor is not as cheap is now of less priority for them...Could it be that they were caught holding too much Won before the crisis and now found themselves not as rich as before and thus less credit-worthy?...Or, they got the money but are just being cautious of the uncertain future...

To: greg nus who wrote (13714)	12/21/1997 3:13:00 PM
From: davesd	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

If there was any money to be made making commodity chips....I'm sure they would have no problems finding money/investors to build more fabs....MU would be the first to fill up their Lehi Fab with new tools. Currently chips are selling at a loss...every chip they sell they lose money....for every US dollar they spend to make a chip they only get a fraction of it back....That is why no one is going to lend them money to add more capacity. Adding more debt to go to .25u makes things that much worse when you cash flow is negative. Plus the recent IMF report seems very bearish for growth...Chip demand could drop from the 1998 projections. dave