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Technology Stocks : Speedfam [SFAM] Lovers Unite ! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SemiBull who wrote (3116)	7/14/1998 3:22:00 AM
From: Q.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3736

Semibull, re. <<, if you are going to quote Carl Johnson re AMAT, at least quote his posting accurately .... "Apparently they are taking share from IPEC and Strasbaugh - not SpeedFam">> I included Carl's full (and accurate) quote implicitly by providing a link to it, so that you could easily read it if you like it. I would never purposefully quote anybody inaccurately. For my purpose, I quoted his numbers, which he got from an analyst, and ignored his speculative interpretation, which is of unknown origin (and which he seems unsure of anyway, judging from his daily and monthly newsletters). If you want to believe his interpretation, that is fine, but I don't have confidence in it. I bought SFAM in the first place because of Carl's enthusiasm for the prospects for its products, and last quarters $7 M CMP sales showed that Carl's enthusiasm had been misplaced. re. <<If you wish to discuss this further, send me a private message so we don't take up thread space.>> I think discussion of whether or not AMAT is taking market share from SFAM, and what SFAM's numbers show or don't show, is quite appropriate for the SFAM thread. (It is a problem of online threads that shareholders often chase away critics, even if they have facts to share.) re: <<did you trade your shares of SFAM for AMAT? >> I traded for ASYT, which is similarly cash-rich, and similarly is in a niche that should grow faster than the front end sector as a whole, but differs from SFAM in that ASYT has a dominant share of its market. ASYT will be exposed to almost the same cyclicality as SFAM, but without some of the company-specific problems of SFAM. By company-specific problems, I mean two things: competition and management failure, the latter being indicated by the recently publicized firing of a top manager. I do not own AMAT, despite its fine business, because the stock trades at price multiples that are not low compared to their historical range. re. cash burn, you are right that SFAM's cash will last a long time, even if CMP sales continue sitting near zero for a while. The lights aren't going to go out in the corporate treasury, but they sure seem to be dim over in sales. regards John