Jay,
You expressed some concerns about the tertiary offering after the press release, but the market reacted favorably.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is offering 2.75 million of the shares while Seagate Technology Inc. (NYSE:SEG - news), a stockholder, is offering the other 250,000 shares, SanDisk said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
SanDisk, which shipped more than one million flash memory cards and flash chip sets in the quarter ended June 30, said it will use the net proceeds from its shares sold to obtain additional silicon wafer foundry capacity, for working capital and general corporate purposes.
It will not receive any of the proceeds from the shares sold by Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate, which held 22.5 percent, or 6,141,374 shares, before the offering, the filing said.
I thought the signal was clear that SNDK would use cash to expand wafer production. Eli spoke to production limitations during the c.c. At that point I thought they would utilize cash on hand, but the attractive stock price gives them the opportunity to use other means such as this "tertiary" offering. Seagate appears to be raising cash on the coattails of SNDK success, but it does not appear that insiders are using this offering as a means to exit the stock with the offering acting as a Trojan horse.
The dilutionary effects seem to be counterbalanced by the growth prospects indicated by the need to expand wafer availability.
As Sam mentioned to me a while back, the Asian Flu may work in our favor here as the infusion of capital needed to spur growth in the region is harder to find now. Thus, SanDisk seems to have the upper hand by bringing cash to the table. Recall the prior wafer plant investments were in the neighborhood of $51 million. I find the total sum of cash being raised phenomenal given the large cash stores on hand already.
I hope that this offering goes well. It will make me feel perhaps a little less upset about the omission of a stock buyback plan last October when we were cash rich and the stock could be purchased for cents on the dollar.
Ausdauer
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