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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (25498)	10/19/1998 5:58:00 PM
From: 16yearcycle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

oh boy! That was Fri, and I missed it until your post. BB, does this change anything? Are we being set up for a late 96- early 1998 style expansion based on competitiveness and borrowing and not profit ability or sanity?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (25498)	10/20/1998 1:21:00 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 70976

from the Samsung expansion article: ". “Producing more DRAM chips to get the lowest cost is the name of the game,” said Tia-Min Pang, an analyst at SG Cowen Securities Corp. in San Francisco. “Micron and Samsung are in a race to make more chips-the only way anyone can make money in the DRAM market.” Sources said Micron's DRAM bit output could quadruple in 1999, once the company finishes upgrading the three fab complexes it acquired earlier this year through the buy-out of Texas Instruments Inc.'s DRAM operations." I thought the way you made money (in DRAMs or anything else) was to sell at a price higher than your production cost. The only way Samsung is going to make money in DRAMs, no matter what their market share, is if prices stay relatively firm, as their production increases rapidly. The current plateau in memory chip prices won't last, if Samsung and Micron both continue increasing production, and demand doesn't keep pace. It's odd, though, that the only reason I've read for Intel's investment in Micron, is to guarantee a memory chip source, which will only be a problem if capacity is tight. It looks like both Intel and Samsung think there will be a huge increase in demand for memory by the end of next year. Why do they think memory capacity will be tight in late 1999?