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

To: Kevin Hay who wrote (27338)	12/21/1998 6:53:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 70976

Kevin - 1st, you meant '1 month later we're two MONTHS into the recovery',yes? No, I meant exactly what I said. Read it again. Point being is there's a lot of unused capacity right now. Well of course I agree that the number one threat to the recovery of the semi equip sector is the economy as a whole. But as for unused capacity in semiconductors, it is hard to measure. Certainly Intel is claiming lack of capacity, and there have been very few fabs built in the last year. Just as we go very quickly and unpredictably from balls to the wall (which doesn't mean what you think it does) to idle capacity, so will we go the other way as lead times start to lengthen and customers start to panic and order ahead. And with so many people eating up the cheap machines I don't see a motivation for any substantial investment in new mfg eq. Who cares whether they are cheap machines or expensive machines as long as they use more silicon than last year and they can't make enough of them. And this is definitely true - see Intel announcement. Clark