". . . Samsung tries to gain market share through reduced margins, but that Samsung is losing market share through reduced margins. . ." Eh, not exactly. Samsung is either maintaining or increasing market share, at least in some segments of flash memory, and they're building a new fab in China. As far as one can tell, Samsung continues to follow its traditional strategy of lowering prices to gain market share, regardless of its effect on their margins. Since they don't give details on gross margins solely from flash memory sales, it's hard to determine what they're up to. But it seems to me that SanDisk maintains a lead in technology, especially for high performing, low cost units for enterprise servers.
As for Intel and Micron, and their efforts in 3D xPoint, recent articles suggest that this supposedly low cost, high speed, high reliability technology is not going to be ready for at least another year, so that should give SNDK--WDC an opportunity to capture greater market share in this segment. If the recent articles about Intel's problems are accurate, then I would not be as pessimistic about WDC and its huge debt as I was earlier.
But I still don't like holding stock in companies with that much debt that has to be serviced before issuing any stock dividends.
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