Little impact seen from Asian market woes

02/01/1998

Little impact seen from Asian market woes.

Noting that the next round of buying in the wafer fab market will be driven by technology and not capacity, market research firm The Information Network, Williamsburg, VA, is forecasting that the recent upset in Asian markets will not have a huge impact on the equipment sector. According to company president Robert Castellano, Asian firms will continue to grow not simply by adding capacity as they did in recent years, but by investing in new fabs that are capable of producing 256-Mbit DRAMs. These projects will be backed with funding from government agencies that see the technology sector as their ticket out of a "`third-world` morass." The firms have been operating at 100% capacity and have maintainied profitability in recent years despite continued softness in DRAM pricing.