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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DownSouth who wrote (7853)	10/8/1999 11:28:00 AM
From: StockHawk	Respond to of 54805

>RE: SNDK, StockHawk's description of SNDK caused an uneasiness in my old bones. What he described was a royalty fight in that market, with marketshare dominance non-existent. My conclusion was that there is no gorilla game there. Anyone else have an impression?< DownSouth, I would not want anyone to draw any conclusions based on my mere two line description of SNDK: SNDK...makes flash memory. Flash memory has seen its greatest use thus far in digital cameras, but other applications such as cell phones, MP3 players, and PDAs are large potential markets. As many of us know Ausdauer presented SNDK to this thread in great detail - a series of post that likely ran a dozen pages - in which he outlined the company's position in terms of the Gorilla Game, stating good reasons why they might evolve into the gorilla in the flash memory field. Anyone wishing to ascertain whether this is a gorilla or royalty game would be advised to review that series of posts. Having said that, part of the reasoning supporting SNDK's gorilla-ness was their proprietary architecture, secured by a long series of patents. This patent position was enhanced a few days ago, as noted in this press release: SanDisk Acquires Invox Technology Patent Portfolio, Hires Invox Technical Personnel BUSINESS WIRE - October 04, 1999 15:06 SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct 4, 1999 (BUSINESS WIREe) -- SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) announced today that it has acquired the patent portfolio of Invox Technology, a privately-held voice storage products company based in Campbell, CA. Included are 19 U.S. patents issued or allowed, and another 28 pending patent applications, most of them in the area of flash memory storage. Terms of the patents purchase were not disclosed. SanDisk also hired a few technical design professionals from Invox, including Geoff Gongwer, Invox vice president of engineering. Sanjay Mehrotra, SanDisk's senior vice president of engineering, said, "The Invox patent portfolio includes valuable multilevel flash memory concepts which will further strengthen SanDisk's more than 100 patents in the field of flash memory storage. We believe that some of these concepts may become useful in the future development of ultra high capacity flash memory chips." Mehrotra added, "We have formed a dedicated team chartered to develop the technology for SanDisk's future gigabit capacity flash memory chips. I am happy to announce that Geoff Gongwer has been appointed as program director for this strategically important project. Geoff brings more than 20 years of experience in non volatile memories including positions at Intel, Atmel and Invox." SanDisk Corporation, the world's largest supplier of flash data storage products, designs, manufactures and markets industry-standard, solid-state data, digital imaging and audio storage products using its patented, high density flash memory and controller technology. StockHawk