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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Math Junkie who wrote (20726)	6/24/1998 3:10:00 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 70976

Michael Murphy likes AMAT: exchange2000.com and sees a bottoming. Excerpt: Q: Some Wall Street analysts were predicting poor earnings estimates such as with Western Digital's earnings shortfall announcement. Will there be a downside pressure for certain sectors? A: There are some sectors where there is significant price pressure. They are SRAM, DRAM and disk drives. Pricing pressure is hurting those particular companies in terms of profit margins. Other sectors are hurting revenues because they sell to Asia. These include 3Com, Motorola and Qualcomm, where they are selling to the far east consumer. For semiconductor equipment companies, their customers would love to buy equipment, but they cannot get the letters of credit. The equipment orders will most likely bottom in this September quarter. The DRAM problem will last for the rest of this year. Recently, in a press release, the Semiconductor Industry Association stated the sale of chips in Asia actually went up in April. This is the second month they were up. Chip sales were also up year over year. I think we are in the bottoming phase right now. There are some weak areas and there are strong areas like communications. The main thing driving this is that we still have double digit growth in personal computers (PC's). In the first quarter, we had 15% growth, 10% in the current quarter, which should be the low and between 10% and 12% growth in the September quarter. There should be a very good fourth quarter, which is when 50% of all PC's sales occur.