Spansion Inc. Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Spansion Inc.

CY 23.82

0.0%

Apr 16 5:00 PM EST

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To: neolib who wrote (4385)	1/1/2009 6:24:53 PM
From: mlc178	of 4590

All the memory manufacturers I looked at have big debts except for Samsung. Some fabless memory companies have small debts but they don't do any manufacturing. However Spansion has the smallest cash position among those I looked at. Up to Sept 2008 they were generating positive cash flow from operations. When you add in the capex, cash flow becomes negative. The small cash level combined with the guidance for a significant revenue shortfall contributes to the fear that is pushing SPSN so low. Here is cash + short term investmemnts in millions. Dec06 $885 Dec07 $416 Mar08 $454 Jun08 $348 Sep08 $259 Rapidly dwindling! I listened to the last analyst conference a while ago where an analyst asked about bankruptcy. That tells you investors are worried about the cash. Cambeau says he plans to spin off the fabs and mentioned merger (with who?). I think SPSN should merge with Numonyx to avoid the price war and talk to Numonyx management to make it a publicly traded company. A merger would bring a monopoly on 2 bit/cell NOR flash. Is Cambeau willing to take this route? Don't know. Regarding EcoRAM, I don't think it will become a big success without additional technological breakthroughs. Just a small niche product. Spansion mentions 1/2 terabyte systems with EcoRAM but they can already get to 1/2 terabyte with DRAM. Several systems from Sun can be configured with 1/2 terabyte of DRAM. The EcoRAM read bandwidth is very small (4Gbyte per second) and the write bandwidth is even smaller than read, like 10 or 100 times smaller. You can get over 30 GB per second with DRAM, so you need 5 or 10 EcoRAM-based systems to match a DRAM-based system on bandwidth. Yes, one DRAM-based system can replace 5 or 10 EcoRAM-based systems. For HPC, bandwidth is the determining factor in performance. Who wants to buy a Nehalem system where Intel put in all the effort to bring monstrous memory bandwidth and throw it out by using an EcoRAM-based system. That's why Spansion will need more breakthroughs to succeed. It's not ready yet.

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