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

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (27860)	1/23/1999 12:31:00 AM
From: Math Junkie	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

<<How long did bookings take to recover in 1985?>> I don't know. The historical bookings data on the SEMI website does not go back that far. I'm not saying that bookings are guaranteed to recover lost ground within any specified period of time. I don't think it's necessary to know how fast the recovery will be, only that we are in a recovery. <<As I've been saying for months, this downturn is really the extension of 1997, not the successor.>> That may be true for the DRAM industry, but when equipment bookings double over a fourteen month period, as they did from Sept. 96 to Nov. 97, it's hard to think of that as a mere blip. <<1997 behavior is extremely unlikely to be a good model.>> I don't think it pays for either semiconductor equipment executives or their investors to get hung up on whether customers are ordering for the right reasons. The equipment companies have to take the orders when they can get them, and the investors have to take the profits when they can get them, without worrying about whether the industry is achieving some mythical nirvana model of sustained, steady growth.

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (27860)	1/23/1999 7:00:00 AM
From: Duker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

I don't know what the recovery was like in 1985? My guess is that it does not matter. Things were a bit different then. The Cold War was in full swing. Reagan was sleeping in office -- which is better than sleeping with someone in the Oval Office. The HMBL had not been required by the FEDs (i.e., the High Mounted Brake Light). Intel still hadn't had its final(?) bought with bankruptcy. Microsoft was not a public company. There was still a loyal cadre of VisiCalc users. The semiconductor capital equipment industry (as we know it) was a bit different. LRCX went public in 1984, the same year in which NVLS was founded. AMAT, the stalwart, was both present and powerful in a relative sense. Its sales reflected the far more limited applications for silicon. Unfortunately, I do not have sales data that goes back that far, but it took AMAT four more years to get to the $500mm revenue milestone. So what is my point? It is probably safe to say that each recovery in such a dynamic industry is a bit different. --Duker