To: Czechsinthemail who wrote (5924 ) 6/19/1998 6:54:00 PM From: Rob-Chemist Read Replies (1) | Respond to
I like PLAB and DPMI, followed by ASYT. The mask makers have not been, and would seem unlikely to be, significantly affected by reduced selling prices for chips and the Asian problems. In fact, they might even be helped by the decreased chip prices. If decreased chip prices "encourage" chip manufacturers to develop new chips that can be manufactured at a lower cost, this will result in the need for more new mask sets since each new version of a chip will generally need a completely new set of masks. In last quarters earnings reports (PLAB = $0.30/share and DPMI = $0.50/share (diluted, after extraordinary items), these two companies as well as MASK ($0.34/share) all said that they had not been negatively affected by the goings on in the rest of the chip industry. Of PLAB and DPMI, I think that I favor DPMI since their year-year growth was significantly greater than DPMI (and, suprisingly, MASK had a growth rate even higher than PLAB). An additional trend that should benefit these companies is that more and more semi manufacturers are contracting out for masks, rather than designing them in-house.
