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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (76523)	3/16/1999 7:53:00 PM
From: Randy Ellingson	Respond to of 186894

This is an interesting (and potentially problematic) situation. Hopefully we can count on our government to continue to play by the new rules that have brought the strong tech growth the US has experienced the past decade or so. biz.yahoo.com Tuesday March 16, 7:27 pm Eastern Time U.S. to lose major computer exports, industry warns WASHINGTON, March 16 (Reuters) - Leading U.S. high-tech companies on Tuesday warned Congress to loosen export controls on business computers or face declining sales abroad and a potential bureaucratic nightmare in the licensing process. The companies, including IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP - news) and Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news), said rules put in place in 1997 to monitor sales of powerful computers to 50 developing countries had quickly becoming outdated. ''Based on today's export control levels, by the end of 1999, the U.S. industry will be required to seek approval for the export of tens of thousands of business computers,'' Hewlett-Packard President Lewis Platt said in a statement accompanying the release of a market research study on the impact of the rules. ''We must face the fact that yesterday's supercomputer has become today's laptop,'' Platt said. The rules require that companies file a notice with the U.S. Commerce Department and wait 10 days before selling a computer capable of 2 billion to 7 billion theoretical operations per second to customers in the 50 countries on the so-called Tier III list. Countries on the list include China, India, Israel and Russia. The Commerce Department and other agencies can object to any proposed sale within the 10-day review period. Last year, the threshold of 2 billion operations covered a computer capable of acting as a high-end server and containing more than four of Intel's then most advanced Xeon chip. The Commerce Department said it received just under 800 notifications last year. But already a computer containing two of Intel's new Pentium III chips exceeds the threshold. And when the company increases the speed of the chip later this year, a computer containing just one chip may fall under the export rules. By contrast, a cutting-edge supercomputer used for advanced weather prediction or nuclear testing models runs at about one trillion theoretical operations per second. As computer speeds increase, the number of notifications could balloon to 300 per day, industry officials said. That would tax the ability of the Commerce Department and other government agencies to assess the filings and determine if a potential sale should be blocked. At a Senate Banking Committee subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, the companies submitted the study by the market research firm Gartner Group showing that foreign suppliers could displace U.S. companies if the export controls remain in place. Lawmakers acted to tighten the reporting requirements for computers in the 2 billion-to-7 billion range in 1997 after reports surfaced that a handful of such computers had ended up in Chinese and Russian defense-related facilities. The high-tech industry faces a long and difficult struggle to convince Congress to change the policy given recent news of Chinese spying on a U.S. nuclear research lab, industry officials acknowledged. ''This was an uphill fight when we began and the current problems with China aren't making it any easier,'' said IBM lobbyist Rich Lehmann.