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To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (14173)	5/29/1998 1:12:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 17305

AV--All I could find on this was the Needham comment about lowering their rating. I agree with you and see this as an opportunity to snag some cheap shares. However, keep in mind that they made their last quarter with good chemical sales and a slow down in the hardware portion of their business which disappointed the underwriters of the secondary offering. Their major hardware customers are seeing rocky times right now though chemical sales should hold up as long as end users (IC manufacturers) are not ramping down wafer starts. The key to financial success here is closely tied to the implementation of new and future technologies. ATMI does not get enough credit for its specialty chemicals that will be an integral part of the next generation of processing technology, especially the copper interconnect technology. This company is priced very close to its price last year when they started their acquisition strategy with ADCS and Lawrence. Since then there have been a few more companies that came under their wing or are being looked at closely. You have 4 million plus shares that were purchased in the high 20s ($~29) recently as a result of the secondary offering. That offering had at least 2 million treasury shares added to the float for ~$58M in cash generation. I would gather that some of the 4M shares, in the hands of funds and institutions, are being dumped to cut losses. This might mean some stagnation in price until new larger investors step in. I just got filled for 5K shares at $18.50 which is not a real good entry price given it dropped to 17 for awhile. I hope you did better than I did. I also would like to thank you for mentioning since it is a good play. Of course, watch the other shoe drop on Monday<GGG>. I think you are also correct in the "overreaction" dept. Montgomery Securities will release data that lowers earnings and revenues for the upcoming quarter based on lower material (chemical vs hardware) sales due to lower IC manufacturing output these past few months. What I think will come as a surprise is that the chemical usage equation has another twist to it. Some of the newer generation hardware configurations being sold have higher capacity chemical vessels. This will extend the previous refill and requalification cycles. What this means is that you will refill less often thereby increasing manufacturing productivity and decreasing equipment/process downtime. Everytime you refill chemicals there is also the mechanical function of disconnecting and connecting fittings and valves along with switching out cyclinders or ampules. Everytime you break into the system like this it is incumbent upon you to go through some sort of requalification of both the equipment and process to ensure everything is operating within specifications and to ensure yields will not be negatively impacted down the road. With this said, I wonder if the street factored this in relative to the upcoming earnings expectations. Personally, I think the chemical usage issue has a dual cause. There has been a decrease in chemical usage since wafer starts probably have decreased over the past few months, especially in the Pacific Rim Foundries. However, there may also be a shift in the replenishment cycles due to the larger capacity vessels and hardware that was shipped over the past few quarters. Until this has "smoothed" over, I would expect uncharacteristic spikes and declines in chemical orders. All this is one man's opinion and insight. I do know from talking to 3 analysts, they are perturbed with ATMI due to lack of "management guidance". They are not getting the information from ATMI management that they would have liked and see this lowered earnings unexpectedly coming out from left field. Andrew BTW-this was a long post in time duration from start of reply to submission. I was talking to analysts, trying to get ahold of the company, and doing some trades. Many interruptions so some of the other analyst printed releases may have already hit the wires.