Was just spending some time rooting around
disktrend.com
to look at disk drive industry. If you're ignorant or intensely curious re: AXC and KM, may want to take a look. did glean a couple neat facts.
Prediction of 170M disk drives sold in 99, up from 90M in 95. I've seen in previous posts here a prediction from them for 114M in 96. Where KM really gets interesting is in 98 when they could conceivably have a whole 12 months of KM sales. 97 looks like probably some initial contracts, either en masse, or filtering in over the course of the first half of the year IMO, but actual sales are at least put off till 2nd half of the year, based on what AXC has said re: product cycle lead time even after contracts are sold.
Major manufacturers listed are:
Seagate (and Conner swallowed up in there)
Micropolis (never heard of em, are they minor, phasing out, etc???)
Western Digital
Maxtor, which is owned by a Korean chaebol
IBM, which we know is 100% MR
HP which has now dropped out, leaving only 7 major manufacturers
Quantum, which supplies to Apple, and contracts 80-90% of manufacturing to some big Japanese firm
And then Japanese manufacturers Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sony.
I wonder then, just who makes up this list of 8 (now 7 w/ HP gone) major manufacturers AXC talks about in their 10Q's?
Obviously:
IBM
Seagate/conner
Maxtor
Quantum
WD
Who am I missing? And when AXC talks about the "Big 7", are they talking worldwide, or just US sales? Can KM get onto all the world's hard drives?
Curiouser and curiouser
PS: Like AXC's new web page info, finally! |
