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Strategies & Market Trends : Three Amigos Stock Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amigo Mike who wrote (2206)	3/27/1998 10:31:00 AM
From: Phil Jacobson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29382

Amigos, Yesterday I did something I usually tell people to never do. I bought a stock (IMPX) based on nothing but insider trading reports and a look at the charts. Five insiders including the Chaiman and the CEO bought in February at just slightly less than the current price of 1 9/16. The Chairman bought 100K shares, CEO bought 10K. Neither buy was related to stock options. The insider buying just pops out at you on the NASDAQ section of the 3/23 Insider Chronicle. They may have invented something - who knows. The stock was actually in the double digits in 1996. Income looks lousy for the last few quarters but the balance sheet looks OK - cash is very consistent and for the last year has always been more than current liabilities. Here's the Hoovers profile: I'll continue to do DD and decide what to do but right now it looks OK. The insider buying looks really compelling. -------------------------------------- OVERVIEW In an effort to win higher profits, IMP is throwing its own chips in the pot. The San Jose, California-based company provides analog and mixed-signal (analog and digital) integrated circuit manufacturing services for companies such as Rockwell International, Iomega, and International Rectifier, which together account for about two-thirds of IMP's sales. However, IMP is steadily pushing its own analog and mixed-signal products that it designs and manufactures for the communications, computer, and systems control markets. Its electrically programmable analog circuits (EPACs) are used in embedded control systems, for example. Analysts expect the analog and mixed-signal chip market to grow at double-digit rates through the end of the decade. IMP was founded as International Microelectronic Products by Zvi Grinfaf and George Gray in 1981. Its initial focus was the design and manufacturing of application-specific custom integrated circuits (ASICs). The company was one of the first to integrate analog and digital functions onto the same chip. Although the firm was stunned in 1985 by the loss of its biggest customer, AT&T, which had accounted for 45% of its business, it rebounded the next year by moving into such new ASIC markets as computers and computer peripherals. It went public in 1987. However, by the early 1990s the tough ASIC market had became unprofitable, so the enterprise shifted gears and began offering analog wafer manufacturing services to other semiconductor companies. The firm also began to develop its own application-specific standard integrated circuit products (ASSPs, or standard products) and changed its name in 1993 to IMP, Inc. The company invented the EPAC device in 1994 and began shipping the user-programmable chips the following year. In 1996 president and CEO Barry Carrington resigned and was succeeded by David Laws; Laws had guided the EPAC rollout. A slump in the chip industry led the company to lay off nearly one-fourth of its employees that year. In 1997 lower orders from Rockwell and declining sales of foundry products led to a loss. That year Laws became chairman and Phil Ferguson became president and CEO.