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

To: Ian@SI who wrote (18740)	4/12/1998 6:14:00 PM
From: davesd	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Ian...these guys and others have been saying that FAB capacity is in the 90% range since 2 years ago.....I wonder how many fabs they visit or get a straight answer from to determine the utilization. Bit growth doubled last year, but MU tripled their output without much capital investment. The Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese who spent billions last year and the year before on equipment have yet to fine tune their shrinks....it was easier to add capacity and increase chip output rather than mess with the shrink...because profits were great...however now they are out of money and will be focusing on reducing shrink to increase output. So if anyone thinks that the Memory glut will be going away soon, they got another thing coming. Plus PC sales aren't that great to drive 100% bit growth this year...ask INTC. in 1997 most PC's were shipping with 32M/64M of memory....100% bit growth would require that all PC's be shipped with atleast 64M. I will agree that leading edge fab capacity may be 90% utilized....question is what % of total capacity is "leading edge capacity"...5 to 10%?? TSMC and UMC will continue to drive the semi cap spending..they seem to be doing ok...but they alone cannot carry the industry....all the other big players are feeling alot of pain. dave

To: Ian@SI who wrote (18740)	4/13/1998 9:21:00 AM
From: akidron	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Ian u really r quite humorless... and utterly self absorbed... I called him fred... sardonically, because he is one of the freds that sit around that table and play with interest rates... fred is a universal term of endearment used in the uk to beliltle someone's who is puffed up, has a bloated self image of himself... fyi women can be freds too... I perfect example of how fred is used is as follows Fred clinton, was jogging this morning when he hurt his ham and eggs, (legs)... so he had to do without for a day or too, he phones up Fred Greenspans to ask him to hold the rates for a while 'cause he need all the feel good he could blow and bluster (muster)... as for my interpretation of fred's comments... I will let the jury decide.... By the way I think it might be better for everybody that we leave each others posts alone... as I have no respect for your opinion and u obviously have none for mine... however I should like to point out that my largest position is not MTSN...