Mark,
I appreciate your response and those from Sam, Z and Stitch regarding the price and cost issue for the DD companies.
From Maxtor's pre announcement a month ago where they forecast their loss to be 18c for the 4th Q, it seems they'll lose $20 million for the quarter. Divide by 5 million drives, thats $4 per drive. As a rough guess, Maxtor needs to increase prices or decrease costs by $4 per drive to break even, and if they can extend that to $10 they will have great profits.
Well, that's like 3% of the average retail price of a disk. So is that such a big deal ? Since disks are a commodity, lets see how other commodities did when demand caught up to supply. Oil went from $12 to $27 with just talk of a tiny restriction in supply (which never occurred). How about Copper prices, or Aluminum or anything else lately now that world economies are recovering.Just as disk prices collapse with a small glut of supply, they can increase strongly with an imbalance on the demand side.
In my opinion, if and when the companies that made it their mission in life to lose $ hundreds of millions by trying to corner the disk market see the error of their ways, raising disk prices by $5 will be a non event.
One question that I have and don't know how to find info is this. Of the marginal DD companies like Fugitsu, JTS, Samsung, Acer, etc.... Do they use GMR technology ? Is it a simple matter for them to convert to that, or does it require an expensive facility upgrade ? I wonder if the gradual dominance of GMR would drive a few vendors out of business ? Where does one find such info ?
-Sarmad |
