Also, perhaps some of you have seen the New York Times article on Seagate this morning. The company announced layoffs of about 10,000 workers. (That's 10 per cent of Seagate's work force. As perspective, that would only be 350 of Adaptec's 3,500 employees). Seagate's CFO was quoted as saying: "There's been really intense competition and some oversupply in the industry, resulting in intense pricing pressure and a softness, particularly in what we call the high end of the business, the high-performance drives which are used for high-performance systems, work stations, mainframes."
The article quotes analyst David Takata (Gruntal & Company): "Demand has been just a bit softer than people had originally expected. That alone shouldn't have thrown the industry into such a tailspin, but it coupled with the fact that everyone overbuilt in trying to capture market share."
But there is an interesting and hopeful (for Adaptec) comment in the article: "the PC market has not grown as quickly as anticipated, and many corporations are now directing their information technology budgets toward faster communications networks rather than toward more capable desktop machines." Faster network communications (bandwidth, data movement) is right up Adaptec's alley.
Perhaps Saviers will comment on that next Tuesday.
Any Adaptec employees read this thread? On the Intel thread John Hull occasionally comments, identifying himself as an Intel worker. It would be useful to get some tech experts from the industry--not to hype their companies (Hull doesn't do that)--but to better inform us of technology developments.
Starowl |
