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Pastimes : The Justa & Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Justa Werkenstiff who wrote (3434)	2/23/1999 12:17:00 PM
From: C_Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15132

Hello Justa, Yes, and we charge to post here. Lars will send you a bill unless you are willing to buy some Mary Kay cosmetics or Brinker tee shirts <g>. Brinker tees or Mary Kay? Hmm, I am sort of a T-shirt guy so a Brinker tee fits the bill. The mailing address is on our website. :-) I am sure Ali did his homework. But where is the money going to come from for all this capex? Have the Koreans learned anything from the last game? That's the $64k question. Right now they are making pretty good margins on DRAM although their spending appears to be very "hand-to-mouth". Did you sit in on the Electro Scientific (ESIO) presentation? Don V. made some interesting comments on yields and also stated that many of the Koreans continued to buy equipment (laser repair) through the downturn. We should remember that Samsung and a few of the other Koreans have been working a long time on their 64Mb DRAM shrinks. I don't really find it that surprising to see their cost structure come in lower than expected. I am reading a report right now that states Korean cap-ex is estimated to be up 46% y/y which tells me they are filling out their shells with leading edge tools. 46% up sounds nice on the surface but this is off a very low base in '98. Perhaps they will spend all this money in the first part of the year? Time will tell. On the Rambus front there appears to be some caution developing with regards to widescale production. The Rambus impact has been mitigated by the delayed launch of Camino chipset - at least until Q3 of '99 but that is not the whole issue. A few of my contacts are saying that RDRAM shipments in '99 will be well below (60% to 70%) current volume estimates. Production issues, including a need to reduce the die size, and test (of course), seem to be bottlenecking the manufacturing effort. The predictions of RDRAM replacing current DRAM generations may take longer than most anticipate. Nice to hear you enjoyed the tutorial. Regards, Carl infras.com