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

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (29845)	4/30/1999 12:44:00 AM
From: William Griffin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 29 /PRNewswire/ -- SEMIndex, a global equity index of 62 manufacturers of semiconductor equipment and materials, closed today at 124.75, Down 3.04 or 2.44 percent from its previous close of 127.80 on Wednesday, April 28. "The drop in the SEMIndex was the result of some concern today in the marketplace about the fate of equipment companies because DRAM prices are down," explained Theodore O'Neil, principal and equity analyst for Needham & Co. in New York. "It is too early in the equipment cycle to be concerned about DRAM pricing. If we were at the top of the cycle and DRAM pricing was coming down, I would be selling these stocks very fast. However, we are in the early stages of the technology buying cycle and DRAM pricing is a minimal issue." Among the 62 global companies included in the index are Kulicke & Soffa Industries (Nasdaq: KLIC), KLA-Tencor (Nasdaq: KLAC), Etec Systems (Nasdaq: ETEC) and ADE Corp. (Nasdaq: ADEX). The specialized technology index was initiated on January 4, 1999, the first trading day of the new year at a value of 100 by SEMI, a Mountain View, Calif.-based trade association which represents 2,300 companies worldwide. SEMIndex is produced for SEMI by Thomson Investors Network, a subsidiary of Thomson Financial Services, a firm comprised of multiple business units servicing the financial services industry. SEMI maintains offices in Austin, Beijing, Boston, Brussels, Hsinchu (Taiwan), Moscow, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo and Washington, D.C. SOURCE SEMI /CONTACT: Bruce Lewis of SEMI PR, 925-284-7004, or blewis@semi.org/ /Web site: semindex.org