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To: mike iles who wrote (34927)	6/15/1998 2:09:00 AM
From: Skeeter Bug	Respond to of 53903

>>MU doesn't have any ... in fact they're $223 million in the hole (net of debt and excluding MUEI's cash).<< mike, can you pay electricity bills with retained earnings facts? with retained earnings like that, who needs them ;-) $223 million in the whole. hmmmmm. it is funny when people start saying things like intel could have cornered the dram market. see how silly people get? the processor and dram markets are absolutely night and day businesses with different dynamics.

To: mike iles who wrote (34927)	6/15/1998 8:56:00 AM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 53903

mike, numbers are such that I could paint any picture I want with. I tried to make a very simple point, in so many years INTC has taken in $5 Billion and has retained 17 Billion (throw in the puny dividends, by the way they did not pay any dividends for their first 30 years or more, DEC never paid a penny of dividend), MU took in about $600 Million and brought in $2.9 Billion (I believe I got this number from the same report as yours, and I do not think that the point differ even if we use your number of $2.3 Billion) in half the time. The fact that currently all these retained earnings are invested in the business (including currently idle concrete and mortar at Lehi), is not relevant. In 1978 (20 years after its inception) INTC had zilch cash on hand as well. The only reason I brought up these numbers was Michael's argument that MU is a "bad" company with "bad" management. You can be negative on the prospects of a company in the short or long term without having to persuade yourself that everything in such as a company is rotten. When you go the route of "everything is rotten" you lose sight of potential changes and improvements and run the risk of impoverishing yourself when such changes occur and blind side you into staying short because your analysis of how everything is bad prevented you from seeing the steps taken to overcome the current problems. I do not know if MU can survive the current DRAM glut, but if it does, some others will not and there will, therefore, be a time when once more this commodity will command prices with very good returns, particularly if some of the other poker players fold, like Intel did. As for the barriers to entry into the DRAM business, they have become quite significant, above $1 billions for a 5000 wafer start per month foundry. Zeev