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

To: davesd who wrote (14411)	1/11/1998 3:55:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Respond to of 70976

Dave, In the post for which I was seeking clarification, I thought you stated that PC growth was either negative or turning negative. In this response, you've indicated that the growth rate has slowed to 15% for the laggards (GTW and MUEI). A couple comments: 1. Economy is forecast to grow at about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2% during '98. Most companies would kill for 15%. 2. Growth in units is not slowing as much as you might otherwise believe. The base from which that 15% is calculated is larger than the base from which the 18-20% was calculated. Yes, prices are falling. So what else is new? Prices have been falling for 30 years. Yes, Asia will contribute less to world growth. It has and will continue to shrink. I'm not convinced that this is a net negative for North American companies. While the SEA companies are unable to raise money to do business, the US companies will gladly take up the resulting slack. Re your last question: Do you any any URL's that show that PC sales growth in ramping up?? Back to talking about absolute growth rather than growth rates again. Yes, most stories that have reported PC sales recently have talked about Year over Year growth - especially if total sales rather than company specific sales were being reported. Essentially, I feel your growth standard is unrealistically demanding. It's a sheer impossibility for the growth rate for any sector to ramp up forever. Within a few years, that sector would be larger than the sum of all the world's GDPs - and that's just not possible. :-) Most of us are happy to see a continuousing growing sector. ... and that remains the case for chips. Ian.