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

To: Ian@SI who wrote (26560)	11/19/1998 11:55:00 PM
From: Dr. Bob	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Ian, FWIW, IMO this is a blip. How can billings get to be substantial until new fabs are announced? Sure, BtB will go up as people need to get spares and move to .18 and below, but this is surely spotty activity, and nowhere near the magnitude needed to make AMAT or anyone else in the industry solidly profitable again, except perhaps some niche companies such as ETEC - and they aren't too excited yet. I'm not an unreconstructed bear; it may be worth getting in if one truly believes the new fab announcements are right around the corner. And who knows? There doesn't appear to be one analyst out there who has called the industry turns consistently - nor one company CEO. So we all take our chances. I just don't believe this move in the billings is very exciting. It's the snapback from no activity for the previous quarter, but it may not be any indication of the months to come. Just to provide the other side of the argument! Bob

To: Ian@SI who wrote (26560)	11/20/1998 6:14:00 AM
From: Justa Werkenstiff	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Ian: Re: "Very nice! And if I remember the conference call correctly, at least one analyst suspects that because AMAT was in its quiet period, it wouldn't have reported its Bookings/billings in time to get included in the preliminary numbers. Morgan didn't have an answer, but if the analyst is correct, we could see a sizeable jump with the revised figures next month." One of the more interesting things of that cc was that question/statement by that analyst. In asking this question, he asked -- I believe -- if AMAT had neglected to report its BTB numbers like it had before last month's BTB release so that people should not get upset by a BTB that did not correspond to guidance. In other words, there seems to be the possibility that last month's numbers were inaccurate due to failure to report by AMAT.