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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Greif who wrote (6810)	8/30/1999 11:33:00 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 60323

Jim, According to what I've read--some of the articles have been posted on this thread--there is a general shortage of flash, which is leading to people adding a lot of capacity. This is both good and bad. Sandisk will have to stay on top of the cost curve with their production capabilities, otherwise we will have a nasty surprise at some point down the road. However, it doesn't appear that this capacity will be on-line any time in the next 6 months at least, and maybe more than that. I'm not sure how long it takes build new fabs for flash, or retool old ones (as, e.g., Fujitsu said it was doing) which were originally built for DRAM; does anyone else have a sense of this?

To: Jim Greif who wrote (6810)	8/30/1999 2:01:00 PM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Jim, I agree wholly. The question remains whether SNDK can make good on OEM demand for CF cards and MMC (bundled with new digital cameras and mp3 players) and still meet aftermarket demand. This is concerning. Can Eli and co. buy flash memory wafer on the open market and at what price? Can they boost supply by increasing their quarterly orders at UMC? Do they have a backup supply of wafer from earlier months when demand was lower? Clearly if they cannot get finished product on the shelf other brands will eat away at market share. Let's hope they have planned ahead. The supply issue is also problematic, especially because money from the tertiary stock offering is still being drummed up as we speak and starting a new fab may be many months away. Could they possibly make a down payment with cash (~$150 million) on hand or use it as collateral??? The other issue that bothers me is the offering price for new shares, the discount to current market price and the terms of the offering. I hope that their will not be an abrupt uptick is stock resold on the street related to the new shares circulating. There are alot of unknowns here. That is why it is called investing. I still feel the SNDK story is extremely compelling and hope we find some traction here in the stock price as we go through this mini-correction. Ausdauer ($83 15/16)