Dear Thread,
I left for San Francisco Wednesday with SanDisk trading at $65.00 a share. I had a turbulent 4 hour flight to SFO. My stomach was churning before I left home for the airport. The choppy flight didn't help much.
I returned from San Francisco last night totally rejuvenated. The Shareholders' Meeting was very exciting for me and confirmed my belief in SanDisk's future. To the new poster who has a friend considering employment there I remark; who could turn down such an opportunity??? The prospects for SanDisk remain bright despite what the stock market wishes us to believe. And as much as our recent ascent to $169 3/4 was overdone on the buying side, the precipitous fall to the mid-$60's was way overdone on the selling side. As Jay Dreifus remarked at the meeting, "fear and greed" drive the market. Right now fear has the upper hand. The Shareholders' Meeting was the best antedote for a severe case of fear.
Dr. Harari used the same slide show he created for the recent Merrill Lynch presentation. His mood was positive. The information he presented confirms and supports our discussion on the Thread about SanDisk's prospects. He talked this year not about "megamarkets", but about "The Tornado" which is going to lift the flash memory market to new heights.
I wanted to post four times about the meeting. These posts will include:
1) A link to my PhotoPoint site with a photo album.
2) A short descriptive post about the Shareholders' Meeting.
3) A synopsis of the information Eli presented.
4) A special presentation.
(I am seriously thinking about individually e-mailing out the third post to interested SI SNDK Thread participants and other interested INDIVIDUAL INVESTORS over the weekend before posting here.)
On the plane trip back home I realized that we need to reevaluate the purpose of this thread. I still believe that the primary goal should be to educate the individual investor about SanDisk and the flash industry at large. In this way we can do our part to attract a stable base of long term shareholders who will help support the stock in times such as these. I remain shocked by the fact that the market has reacted in such a contrarian manner against SanDisk given the recent quarter's results, the Lexar Media partial summary judgement and, arguably the most important event in the company's history, the consummation of the Toshiba/SanDisk JV with the formation of FlashVision LLC.
It would be nice to have some technical commentary now and then as we reach extremes of valuation. As a long-term shareholder I have tried to fight the urge to trade SanDisk shares. It would have been helpful, IMHO, to have discussed a "temporary and partial" exit strategy when SNDK reached its peak near $170.00/share, just as it is important to reassess our belief in the company when the market turns against us. It would appear that we are, once again, "totally unhinged" from any standard assessment of value.
Personally I have always been more inclined to purchase shares at the time of major press releases with the pre-requisite that the stock seem reasonably valued at the time. I try to be very selective in labelling a press release as "major". At the time of the Lexar Media legal defeat I added at prices between $113.00 and $118.00 blissfully ignorant of the market forces about to be applied to SNDK. Around the time of earnings I added shares between $86.00 and $102.00 (at a time when I was enthusiastic about Microsoft's interest in and support for CF/MMC for the Pocket OS). At the time of the JV announcement (which Eli stated was at least 6 weeks away at the time of the Q1 conference call!), I once again shares in the low to mid-80's. Needless to say, the free fall we have experienced once again tested my faith in the company. We SNDK shareholders have experience downdrafts like this before in the wake of the tech sell-off in 1998 (at a time when weak earnings growth and general market weakness justified the sell-off) and in September of 1999 (when a devastating earthquake left the future of SNDK in the balance), but never have we witnessed a sell-off of this magnitude in the face of such impressive top and bottom line growth or such important milestone events for the company.
My final comment at this juncture surrounds the recent activity in the stock market. It would appear that somebody wanted or needed to exit SanDisk at a time when fear was running through the NASDAQ and no buyers were willing to step up to the plate. The large block sales certainly point toward Seagate, although I hardly see a major storage industry insider bailing at bargain basement prices. Clearly, shorting blocks of stock this large is suicide.
Ausdauer |
