Allan
<<1)...What are they doing to insure that they'll have more customers,
retain their present customers and gain more market share, in the coming months?>>
They will gain share at WDC in the next few Qs. The quicker transition
to MR is and will continue to hurt APM. QNTM is a prize
they MUST get back(but who knows whether they will) and SEG
is currently looking to outsource heads. Also, Maxtor is a very good
customer of theirs, and looks to be doing well in these times.
Samsung scares me(from a DD player side). I'm happy to see RDRT affiliated with them.
<<3) According to a friend of mine, who use to work at Read Rite, he says
that they are at least a year and a half behind schedule, but they do have
a great program going on with very dedicated people. >>
Behind on what? MR? GMR? Plant construction?
It is certainly not MR heads. They've qual'd 2.1GB heads with
3 pgms(WDC, Samsung, Maxtor) You'll see 2.8GB heads in March.
They are movoing as fast as anyone in the industry.
GMR? Well, as far as I can tell, they plan on producing GMR heads in
early 1999 which I believe has been the plan for a while, a seems to fit
with the rest of the industry. Everyone is behind IBM(and always will be)
Please tell what you mean by behind.
<<4) ...RDRT Fremont was built on an old "Indian Burial Site.">>
Oh come on dude. Are you serious?
<<5) The whole disk drive industry is starting to take a bad turn with Seagate
stopping the construction of their plant in Ireland and laying off 1400 employees>>
From my standpoint, this is a good thing for the industry. What we need
right now is less capacity. (And it always helps when the shutdowns and
cancelations happen at a company I'm not invested in) Even the Akashic layoff
news is a good thing IMO. I presonally hope to see more reduction plans
announced(and expect to see it in the next few months - we'll see a few players
crash and burn IMO)
todd |
