Of course, I rant about how hard it is to get someone to return my calls. Then I decide to call them again and get right through to Dave Zacarias. I called from home instead of from work, so I didn't have all my neatly arranged questions in front of me, but I did have a brief conversation with him (and someone will call me tomorrow).
1. He has been swamped and hasn't been getting back to investors like he knows he should have been. They're actively looking for an investor relations person to help this in the future.
2. Banshee is doing better than they expected and the pressure is on them from their boardmakers to get more chips out. They're trying, but will carry a backlog into Q1. He didn't dispute the 1.2 million chipset number that has been published, but he didn't confirm it. In my opinion, that means it is a decent estimate with some upside.
3. Sales of Voodoo2 are doing well in the retail channel and they are getting the level of orders they expected (somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500K). They may get more this quarter, but they're not counting on it. Seems to be on track to sell remaining V2 inventory by Q1 next year.
4. Recent retail data says that V2 is #1 and Banshee is #2.
5. Margins are lower (always were going to be lower for Banshee) and V2 is later in its life so ASP (as discussed in the CC) will be lower. My opinion (discussed and somewhat agreed to by DZ), is that all their customer know they have too much V2 inventory and are putting price pressure on them. This means that their sales give less to the bottom line.
6. Additional expense in Q4 is mainly marketing - T.V. campaign (3Dfx logo in software ads) and COMDEX. These were planned Q4 events.
7. Didn't argue the consenus opinion, but that doesn't mean anything, he didn't make any comment at all on EPS (and I would've been amazed if he did). I'm guessing that there will be some surprise over it, but it'll be closer to the truth than in Q1 and Q2.
8. Additional OEM(s) will have Q1 impact. V3 sales not expected to be a large part of Q1.
Completely forgot to ask about Creative Labs (that's what happens when you don't have your notes). I'll ask tomorrow.
Michael
ps - still glad I sold 1/2 my stake, it 3Dfx was 25% of my non-401(k) portfolio and that was too much. I have high tolerence for risk, but I wanted to diversify. |
