To All:
Good News ????
Read-Rite to Supply Maxtor Corporation with Magnetoresistive Recording Heads with Capacity in Excess of 1.6 GB Per Disk
MILPITAS, Calif., May 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Read-Rite Corporation (Nasdaq:RDRT) today announced that Maxtor Corporation has qualified its magnetoresistive (MR) recording head for an upcoming new desktop drive program at a capacity in excess of 1.6 gigabytes (GB) per 3.5-inch disk.
``We are very pleased to have been selected as one of the primary suppliers for this program,'' Alan S. Lowe, president and chief operating officer, told members of the investment community during the Smith Barney Technology Conference today in New York. ``Completing the qualification was a tremendous cooperative development team effort between Maxtor and Read-Rite. Maxtor now becomes our third customer of MR recording heads and our plan is to be shipping MR heads to five major customers by the end of fiscal 1997,'' he said. ``We are also pleased that this program will be our first MR drive program for which we will be shipping MR heads as fully assembled head stack assemblies (HSAs).'' Since Read-Rite successfully started volume MR production in mid-1996, the company has shipped more than 15 million MR recording heads.
According to Michael Cannon, Maxtor president and chief operating officer, ``We are very pleased with the significant progress made by the Maxtor and Read-Rite team on this MR drive program which will position Maxtor very well as the industry continues its rapid transition to MR technology.''
MR wafers will be produced at the company's Fremont, California wafer fab and the MR slider and head gimbal assemblies (HGAs) will be manufactured in Thailand. The MR HSAs will be produced at its Penang, Malaysia plant.
Read-Rite Corporation is the world's leading independent manufacturer of recording heads, HGAs and HSAs for disk drives and magnetoresistive heads for quarter-inch-cartridge tape drives. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California and has operations in Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Read-Rite employs some 21,000 people. The company's home page on the World Wide Web can be reached at www.readrite.com.
The above press release taken with the following excerpt from the 10Q, may be good news for Ampex!!!!
" Although MR heads are currently in short supply, industry sources estimate that by the end of 1998 the majority of disk drives being manufactured will utilize MR heads, due to their enhanced storage potential over inductive heads. Maxtor Corporation, a disk drive manufacturer with which Ampex has
previously announced an agreement to utilize keepered media, has advised the Company that its preference is to switch future programs from inductive to
MR-based designs, provided that a sufficient quantity of MRheads becomes available.
As a result of this anticipated transition to MR disk drives, Ampex has
been increasing the proportion of its keepered media development efforts that is focused on MR technology. During the first quarter of 1997, the Company
demonstrated under laboratory conditions a significant increase in the capacity of MR heads utilizing keepered media. "
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