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Technology Stocks : General Lithography -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SemiBull who wrote (899)	3/12/1998 3:12:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1305

SemiBull, Re SVGI: Their lithography business has just matured within the past 1 1/2 years. Until now all capacity was consumed by their top 4 customers. They still have more DUV scanners in production than all other equipment makers combined. Whether they still have the technology lead or not is now in question, IMO. This should be a very interesting stock during the next 2-4 quarters. Without a successful lithography division, I think they're "toast". With it, it may be a very attractive investment. I haven't decided whether to sell or buy more... Ian.

To: SemiBull who wrote (899)	3/12/1998 10:20:00 PM
From: Crossy	Respond to of 1305

Semibull, look also to the fact that SVGI almost got no debt. They seem to finance their ramp-up internally, which is a good sign. They could emerge as No. 2 or 3 player, competing with ASMLF for the No.2 spot within the next 3 years.. regards CROSSY

To: SemiBull who wrote (899)	3/13/1998 9:04:00 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1305

Regarding SVGL, you wrote: >>"if we build it, they will come... and buy." I had that sense, along with the perspective that they had a technical edge on the step & scan niche for the 0.25 DUV market.<< The problem is not in the second half of that sentence, but in the first half. Building scanners is a lot tougher than building baseball parks. Their leading edge system (193 nm) is not a production ready tool. That's okay, for now, because no one else has a production tool either, but there's a long long distance, in both design and manufacturing, between one or two R&D machines and 200 production machines. As far as the 0.25 micron step & scan niche goes, my recent conversations with litho people suggest that it's by no means obvious that the market wants step & scan tools right now, particularly from a vendor whose future stability is by no means assured. See news.semiconductoronline.com for more details. Briefly, step-and-scan is the wave of the future, but litho people always want to delay the future as long as they can keep current technology working at a reasonable cost. Now, with all that said, I still have a pretty positive feeling about SVG. I've met a lot of the people there, and they've got some good brains working on the problems. They've also managed to make some pretty important friends among the US chipmakers, all of whom would dearly love to have a domestic source for advanced lithography. The question is whether that's enough in the face of the huge amounts of money that advanced litho development requires, and the huge revenues that the big guys have to throw at it. Katherine