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

To: Big Bucks who wrote (27427)	12/26/1998 3:28:00 PM
From: Leto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Hitachi is indeed losing significant amounts of money. I live in Tokyo and the husband of a good friend of my wife works for Hitachi. They are literally hemorrhaging cash right now. I am not surprised at the loses since 1996(cumulative losses of 250 billion yen which works out to about 2.1 billion US dollars). Japanese are very reluctant to throw in the towel and they have significant cash reserves. You would think, however, that there would be an end to it. The one area that may be moving in the direction of Japan right now is the trend towards CPUs and DRAM being commodities. When I look at computers today, I can only think that the boxes sold by Gateway, Compaq and others are too big and the monitors take up too much space. Flat panel displays and making the box containing the CPU, RAM, HDD, etc. smaller is very desirable at this point in my opinion. Since virtually all of the flat panel displays are made by Japanese companies and are now fetching premium prices one may see a turnaround in the fortunes of such large Japanese companies as Sony, Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic) and JVC. They are very good at consumer electronics and computers are becoming essential consumer items. Just some opinions. I am certainly interested in the opinions expressed in this forum as it relates to future trends in the semiconductor industry. Leto