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

To: Ian@SI who wrote (19367)	5/13/1998 11:09:00 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 70976

Ian, I don't know where they heard this either. Management explicitly said there were 2 schools of thought on when the upturn would begin(late this year/mid '99) and they were not subscribing to either one at the moment. I missed the last several minutes in the Q&A session, but from what I heard they aave no right to make this claim. Brian

To: Ian@SI who wrote (19367)	5/13/1998 12:15:00 PM
From: Justa Werkenstiff	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Ian: Point of clarification. Let's roll the tape from the cc: "The market continues to reflect uncertainty and we now believe we are beginning to troll the bottom of this cycle. We cannot now predict the end of the cycle. There are two schools of thought. One view is that the orders will bottom out in the fourth calendar quarter of 1998 which is AMAT's first fiscal 1999 quarter due to predictions of the capacity imbalance in memories. Another view is that order rates for the industry will not bottom out until the second calendar quarter of 1999 which is AMAT's third fiscal quarter. We don't subscribe fully to either point of view but we must be prepared for one or the other to occur." In my mind, AMAT was stating a range for the bottom. They were saying, in effect, that the bottom could occur within the time frame between these two scenarios or at either end of the spectrum that these two scenarios. IMHO, underlying this message was the idea that this was their best educated guess and that nobody, even people on this board <g>, knows when the next up cycle will occur. I believe this is where A & H may have made their inference. But who knows. They may have inferred that AMAT's orders will bottom during this time period. But it is not necessarily clear to me whether AMAT management was talking about AMAT in particular, the industry in general or both AMAT and the industry in the comments quoted above. I can't help with the other inference by A & H. I don't remember hearing anything about an upturn in the second half of 1999 re capital expenditures. The only thing I remember about that time frame is that AMAT expects DRAM to come into parity in mid 1999.