Investment firm Citi said on Friday that it sees "99 billion reasons to stay long" semiconductor equipment stocks after attending the SEMICON West conference, citing an expected recovery in chip equipment spending in 2024. Comments from Tokyo Electronic, whom analyst Atif Malik met at the conference, suggest that wafer equipment spending will be $99B in 2024, while Citi is estimating $88B, aided by mature logic spending across the U.S., Europe and China and stronger spending for memory, both in dynamic random access memory and NAND. "Tokyo Electron’s 2024 [wafer fab equipment] view is supportive of our cyclical recovery phase 2…