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

To: Andrew Vance who wrote (951)	4/8/1998 1:34:00 PM
From: Investor2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1305

Andrew, I know that you used to be a UTEK fan. If you still are, you may find this post from another thread interesting. Please note that I'm not the author of the following article. "Will UTEK hit 17 or 37 first I can not say but I can say that the bad news is in the markets so I think the surprise will be to the upside. The stock may go down but the management team is excellent I have meat with them and feel very confident that they will be a stronger company when all is said and done. I will not bank on the short side on this company. The next two quarters (1Q & 2Q) should be flat. The company continuing to see weakness in both the semiconductor and the disc drive markets that they serve. Several large companies continue to buy machines from UTEK for MR and GMR applications and it looks as though they will blow right through this downturn. However, some of the other disc drive manufacturers, continue to see weakness in their businesses, so they are only selectively buying from utek at this time. I believe that they will see some consolidation in this group before the end of the year since quite a few of these good companies are really seeing some bad times. The micromachining side of the business is continuing to be robust and indications are this area will continue to prosper with no effects from the overcapacity in both the semi and disc drive markets. In 1996, micromachining was 4% of utek sales. Last year, 1997, micromachining was 20% of utek sales. There are four segments to this market, consumer electronics, biomedical, automotive and industrial control. Currently, Hewlett Packard dominates the consumer electronics market with their ink jet printerheads. HP Singapore is the largest manufacturer of these heads. HP uses utek steppers for this application and they have recently seen an increase in their buying of machines particularly for the Singapore and Ireland locations. In addition, they are seeing more activity on the automotive side from some of our customers that they sell to including Delco, Ford, ELMOS (German company that makes the BMW). UltraBeam Lithography is continuing to be quite promising. Currently waiting for Photronics to put utek first machine(shipped in the fourth quarter of 1997) into production. (An ETEC machine has to be removed before utek machine will be put into production.) The machine tested superbly in utek facility, however, it must perform at the customer's site. They plan on shipping the next machine the first half of this year. They have many orders for this machine and are currently targeting the domestic merchant market makers. Once they are established with all of the merchant mask makers, they plan to proceed to work with the captive mask makers to sell our machines into that arena. Verdant Technologies is continuing on schedule. Currently perfecting a process that would enable utek to put these machines into production sooner than anticipated. This machine is so advanced, that it is difficult to implement into current fab lines. That's the reason utek wants to first seed the machines into R&D facilities, then into production facilities. However, utek may be able to put them into production facilities sooner than expected." Best wishes, I2