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

To: jeffbas who wrote (1003)	5/27/1998 10:56:00 PM
From: Crossy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1305

Jefrey, I don't say that DPMI/PLAB are bad investments - they all are way better than most other semi equip companies right now because they are under NO margin pressure and they can sell their equipemtn all the times instead of in staggering patterns. However I studied the balance sheet of MASK carefully again after my post and saw this which I liked very much: right now no Debt (D/E raio = 0). Cash flow per year = $8 million right now. I'm no accountant but I guess what counts for the "books" is the date when You start "producing" from Your eqipment. Also they have $5-6 million in cash right now. This tells me they could finance easily. If they would resort to a means of dealing with this under a leasing / similiar approach that would synchronize cost with revenues even more I guess there would be no effect on statement of operations at all. For instance if they first just get supplied the ETEC eqipment as a "test" facility to complete the know-how acquisition and then "finalize" this. This is accounting stuff and not really my domain but there are ways to manage earnings or deal with depreciation artifacts in this industry that I do know. Also beware that the long term asset "eqipment" in the yearly 10-K reports jumped from 8 million to over 38 million in just over 2 years (from 1995 to 1997). This somewhat resembles this 25million investment in eqipment they ordered now. So if the expansion in the past wasn't the problem - the current expansion should neither be. Also about half of old eqipment should already have been depreciated, making the investment appear even better. Anyway, "lead-time" cycle required to master the 0.25 micron is still in question. Anyone has a figure on that ? best regards & thanks CROSSY