Here's the full RDRT press release:
Read-Rite Announces Preliminary Sales Results for the First Quarter of Fiscal 1998 Ended December 28, 1997
MILPITAS, Calif., Jan. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Read-Rite Corporation (Nasdaq: RDRT - news) today announced that due to reduced shipments for the last two weeks of the December quarter, it expects to report sales of approximately $261 million for the first quarter of fiscal 1998 ended December 28, 1997; accordingly, the company expects both sales and earnings will be below current analysts' expectations. For the first quarter of fiscal 1997 the company reported sales of $251.6 million.
The company also said that in connection with its accelerated transition to magnetoresistive (MR) recording head technology it will take additional charges in the first quarter of fiscal 1998, primarily related to a more rapid phase-out of its advanced inductive recording head technologies. These charges would be above the previously announced $30 million in anticipated charges associated with the write-off of inductive technologies which Read-Rite believed it would take during the first fiscal quarter of 1998.
Read-Rite said it would have further comments when it reports its first quarter of fiscal 1998 results on Wednesday, January 21, 1998, after the close of the market.
Read-Rite Corporation is the world's leading independent manufacturer of recording heads, head gimbal assemblies (HGAs) and head stack assemblies (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 23,500 people. The company's home page on the World Wide Web can be reached at www.readrite.com.
SOURCE: Read-Rite Corporation
My guess is that we see a temporary blip due to WDC's transition to MR way ahead of schedule. It seems very hard to believe that WDC has just dropped this on their suppliers, but then who knows. The slow down seems to be a determined effort to not produce any TFI heads. I find it hard to swallow that they've all been caught so off guard on the TFI to MR change over. Hard thing is, the good companies like Quantum don't seem to have gotten the benefit that they should have. Still, when you look at WDC share price, it's pretty scarey.
Anyway, despite possible slowdown this quarter, seems like they are all racing to get MR production in place and damn the cost. Hope it pays off.
Regards,
Mark |
