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To: Ian@SI who wrote (24520)	9/21/1998 11:28:00 PM
From: Ramsey Su	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Ian, it is my understanding that North American btb means North American companies, therefore excluding companies like Nikon. May be Katherine can verify. In the mean time, is this old news? OSAKA (Nikkei)-Matsushita Electronics Corp. has decided to postpone the start-up of operation at two semiconductor plants due to weakening demand for memories, company officials said Monday. The company also plans to cut annual capital outlays to 60 billion yen from the originally budgeted 100 billion yen for four years from this fiscal year. Operation of a chip production plant at its Tonami factory in Toyama Prefecture will be delayed until the beginning of 1999 as 64-megabit chip prices have fallen further than expected. The new plant, which is capable of producing the equivalent of 3,000-5,000 8-inch wafers with circuit width of 0.25 micron a year, had been slated to fabricate 32-bit microcontrollers and 64-megabit DRAMs. Meanwhile, Matsushita Electronics will also postpone constructing an advanced chip plant at either its Niigata or Toyama plants until sometime after 2000. Advanced manufacturing technology will be adopted at the new plant to make chips with 0.18 micron circuit width. Matsushita Electronics saw a low 370 billion yen in chip sales in fiscal 1997, with DRAM sales accounting for only 5-6%. The Matsushita group has also decided to shut down its U.S. chip-making subsidiary by the end of the year. (The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Tuesday morning edition)

To: Ian@SI who wrote (24520)	9/21/1998 11:39:00 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Respond to of 70976

The Semi BtB is global sales by North American equipment companies. AMAT's share of the book to bill numbers may be bigger than their share of the overall equipment market. Reason being that lithography, the largest market segment overall and the largest segment in which AMAT does not have a presence, is dominated by Nikon, Canon, and ASML. Since these three companies are all foreign, litho would have a smaller-than-expected impact on BtB, and AMAT's dominance of non-litho segments would be magnified. Katherine

To: Ian@SI who wrote (24520)	9/22/1998 2:29:00 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Who is right? from today's WSJ: "the new estimates provided by Lipper Analytical Services, and two companies that specialize in tracking fund-investor sentiment, show that in August investors pulled as much as $9 billion more from stock funds than they put into such accounts. The last time the fund industry experienced so-called net redemptions was September 1990, when investors yanked $520 million from stock funds, according to ICI. What's so interesting about the estimates provided by Lipper Analytical Services, AMG Data Services and TrimTabs.com is that it pokes a hole in the fund industry's mantra that investors don't react when the market topples. In fact, data from all three services show that investors pulled out quickly from the hardest-hit sectors. A. Michael Lipper, chairman of Lipper Analytical Services, said one interesting tidbit from his data is that the vast majority of the money that left stock funds stayed at the fund firms and moved into bond and money-market funds. "What I am sensing is that money isn't leaving the game -- it's staying in fund accounts if not the same fund houses, so that people intend for the money to come back in," Mr. Lipper said. He said fund investors are "making a market judgment not a product judgment." On the other hand, I've read a couple of articles saying that insiders, especially in tech companies, have recently become big buyers of stocks. Hint: look at the last time there was net redemptions, Sept. 1990. In retrospect, that was a very good time to be buying stocks. And a poor time to be selling.