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Technology Stocks : Dupont Photomasks (DPMI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nevin S. who wrote (386)	3/17/1998 4:28:00 PM
From: jeffbas	Respond to of 955

Your analysis is approximately correct and what attracted me as well - the more stable business model. That said, if less chip plants are built there is probably likely to be less design activity than if more are built. Also, more chips produced does not necessarily mean more chips designed - 2 million 300mhz Pentium chips produced may not mean more mask revenue than 1 million. Shorter product life cycles, which seems to be the case, and the interesting response of MU to deal with difficult industry conditions by rapidly shrinking feature sizes do increase the number of designs (masks) and their cost. (The MU situation suggests that in some respect DPMI business is actually counter-cyclical - if everyone is making tons of money from existing chips without tough competition, there is less incentive to push new designs.)