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Technology Stocks : Etec Systems moving up -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (989)	6/4/1998 6:57:00 AM
From: Carl R.	Respond to of 1279

*OFF TOPIC Concerning VECO ** Let's take this discussion to the VECO thread, but yes they seem to believe that the AFM will become a production tool at low geometries whereas now it is mostly an R&D tool. Actually ETEC buys them for something, by the way. But VECO does a lot more that that. For a company their size, they are surprisingly diverse. In the traditional Veco business, most volume (60-70%) comes from sales to disk manufacturers, with a small portion from semi-manufacturers and flat screen makers. They sell tools for disk head etching, for disk profiling, as well as ion deposition tools. They purchased Wyko last year and just purchased Digital Instruments which enhances their metrology tools for process manufacturing and increases their AFM business. Because of these acquisitions, their business is changing and it is hard for me to tell how their business will hold up in the slump. Two years ago, it was easy to say that they would continue to grow because only a minority of their business would be affected (i.e. since most business came from disks anyway). They did experience a significant slowdown in growth in the last half of last year related to the disk industry, and saw reductions in profit as well, but the disk industry seems to be getting back on track, so any slowdown in orders from the semi industry could well be offset by increases from the disk sector. Anyway, they reported a very strong BTB of over 1.2 in the first quarter, and have indicated that they expect BTB to stay above 1 this quarter as well, so I am optimistic that while they may not grow fast during the remainder of this year, they should remain solidly profitable, and certainly will not shrink significantly, and may well grow slightly. I also think that the growth rate will pick up significantly in 1999 when all parts of the business are growing at the same time. Again, let's take this to the VECO thread where you can have your questions answered by more people than just me. Carl