Who says Smith Barney is looking at AXC? what's the source? Please divulge at least something here. What will really drive this stock further in teh future is major brokerage buy recommendations. Also, you say news on KM contracts will come out in February/March. On what basis are you saying this? Not a disbeliever per se, just wondering, as always, what "weight" to put on comments from this brave new world of more of less anonymous info.
Wonder if we don't have another 1/4 or 1/2 point to suffer thru before we finally turn up here. Have figured that interest eps on their $30M cash is nearly $.02/share, so coming up with the other 3 or 4 cents that is forecasted is getting increasingly easy to believe, IMHO.
The reason AXC IR can't give a timetable for KM/MR is that they don't have one! Pennsylvania Merchant Group figures it'll probably be about a year, but how much AXC advised them on this is hard to know. Guess it sounds about right to me, considering it took even longer than that for them to get inductive KM out of the lab and signed onto a contract. Thus, I'm guessing we won't see the real future of KM-- MR side of things-- signed till much later this year. Heartening to see IR referring to 20% MR improvement as just the beginning, that further refinement is possible, with resultant compelling increases in performance. For an explanation of why so long, see one of A.S.Ong Yiu's posts about a hundred back or less re: the extreme complex interdependency of a disk drives' parts. Takes a lot of tweaking to get everything to work, and then lots more can be done to optimize it, based on what I've seen posted by Gus in the past.
Dreaming of 99 and beyond, just a reminder that each successive year has +100M platters presently forecasted to be used. That means 99's 600M/platters turns into 2000's 700M, 2001's 800M. Multiply that by ~$1/platter and you're still talking real eps growth, even after they could first realistically fully saturate the market in 99. After a dark day, I'm recovering my mood. "Efficient Market Theory" bah, humbug!
Agree with new poster that there'll be some institutional reluctance towards AXC because of decades of missed opportunities, but they were under Allied Signal for some time, LBO'd in late 80's by Bramson's group, and he's sure done a lot to finally bring it to the threshold of greatness. But, probably few portfolio managers will remember that, why, most werent' managing money on 10/19/87!
PS. Could someone do us a favor and put in a buy order for 100K shares at 9 1/2, just to get things reversed? |
