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

To: Gottfried who wrote (21096)	7/4/1998 5:07:00 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

GM, Yes that is my message. SFAM and IPEC are a hurtin' big time. I did not corroborate his #'s dollar for dollar but SFAM's last CC did not sound too good, leading me to believe the #'s are correct. Also, this was one of the bright areas for AMAT during their CC. Although CMP is a small market now, it's also one of the fastest growing. These #'s lead me to believe that AMAT is approaching ~50-60% market share since I believe total CMP revs for 98 were estimated to be in the 600-700M range. Remember that AMAT's % of the CMP market grew from ~3% in 96 to ~17% in 97 to 50%(??) for the current year. DISCLAIMER: these #'s are coming from memory so may be a bit off. Brian

To: Gottfried who wrote (21096)	7/4/1998 5:43:00 PM
From: Big Bucks	Respond to of 70976

GM, My suspicion is that equipment mfg's such as SFAM are going to be very cost competitive to AMAT in order to increase sales. It will be hard for AMAT to be as competitive since it has very high "overhead" business costs to support its' world-wide infrastructure. I'm thinking that these "single dimension", focused product, companies will be very aggressive in their pricing to maintain a cost edge since they are in a battle to survive until the next upturn occurs. The other possibility is they will be aquired or merge with larger companies looking to offer well rounded "equipment package sets" to fabs which will give them competitive advantage. It seems that a smaller/mid-sized companies will be lean and hungry for business. I think that mid-sized companies have the greatest upside potential if they have good products and a good equipment mix to offer over the short term. It appears that equipment pricing will be a major factor to reduce production costs in the future. AMAT is the Cadillac of the line, many fabs will want Chevy's to meet their needs until they can afford Caddies. Just my opinion, BB