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

To: BMcV who wrote (28340)	2/17/1999 11:10:00 AM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 70976

Bruce, Jim, Brian, AMAT investors, >>>Morgan on CNBC at 9:10, according to Tim Tindall, who will probably get fired for letting the cat out of the bag.<<< I took some notes. Interviewed by Mark Haines with Joe Battapaglia chiming in. Haines: Can you characterize this upturn in your sector with previous ones? Morgan: It's too early to make such a comparison. Haines: What are the drivers in the upturn? 300 mm? Finer line widths? Morgan: No and yes. 300 mm. has barely gotten started. WRT finer linewidths, 'definitely, and, we can supply a full line of products.' Implied one stop shopping for 0.18, e.g. Haines: How about copper? Morgan: Just starting. 2 - 5 year program here. Morgan went on to say that AMAT's EPIC (Equipment Processing Integration Center) has been very well received by customers. What this is, is kind of a benchmark demo center at Applied, whereby customers can come into AMAT Sunnyvale and get demoed their "end to end" 0.18 micron (don't know about copper) equipment. Battapaglia: How about worldwide? Morgan: Orders are up in every region of the world. Applied is also GAINING MARKET SHARE around the world, somewhat of a result of their new product offerings. Battapaglia: How about semiconductors themselves. Are chip prices firming? (Implication that this would certainly help AMAT, my comment). Morgan: Yes. Haines: How about Japan? Morgan: Still struggling, but, again, AMAT is gaining share here as well. Haines: Who is the strongest coming out of the slowdown in the Far East, Korea, Taiwan? Morgan: About equal. Both regions' customers starting to buy again. Haines: Is the new business going into new fabs, or updating existing fabs? Both. Missed another comment here. Haines: Any particular type of chips leading the way back, microprocessors, memory, DSPs, appliance chips (think he meant embedded microcontrollers)? Morgan: All of the above. All are requiring newer processing technology (finer lines mostly) and their manufacturers are all buying. Summary, Morgan as usual all business. No hypester like McNeally or Ellison, more like an Intel type. At the same time, he was definitely very positive. Tony