Can someone help "netsapian" with a question of fact. Interesting!
He asks:
Last night while posting on Yahoo, I rattled off some quickly derived stats based on future earnings from DST tape cartridge sales. I am missing an accurate price that customers pay for each cartridge--so I based the price on about 2 cents/megabyte. See below what I came up with. If we can get some agreement on these possibilities, it would be an excellent addendum to the Ampex Synopsis, as you'll see upon reading this, if I am not too erronious in my assumptions.
-------Future DST Tape Cartridge Sales----------
At some point--once there are a few thousand DST's out there, new tape cartridge orders will start to bring in appreciable profits. Usually, markup is fantastically high on cartridge sales. Am I correct that each 330 GIG cartridge sells for somewhere between $5000 and $6000 dollars' (Ampex states the DST per Meg cost is less than 3 cents/Meg. Let's call it 2 cents/meg ...that comes out to .02 x 1000 = $20/gig....330 gig x $20 = $6600/ cartridge for 2 cents per meg. Now let's say they really meant 1.5 cents per meg instead, so shave 25% off of $6600 and we get $4950/cartridge at 1.5 cents/meg. Ampex probably spends $450 Max manufacturing each cartridge, so $4950 - $450 = $4500 Net Profit per Cartridge. In two years time, let's assume they have 3000 DST's out there in the field, and each DST needs 5 new cartridges per year. We now have orders for 15,000 new cartridges a year. That's a net profit of 4500 x 15000 = $67,500,000/Yr. That's about $1.25/share right there. And we think the $10 Million per year from royalties is big.
Can someone check my math--it's coming out far better than I had guessed it would! This means it would really pay to sell the DST's at a (much)lower price. |
