Any of you cognoscente on the thread know SNDK's main competitors?
Aug. SEC filing (I don't see TXN):
"Our Markets Are Highly Competitive
We compete in an industry characterized by intense competition, rapid technological changes, evolving industry standards, declining average selling prices and rapid product obsolescence. Our competitors include many large domestic and international companies that have greater access to advanced wafer foundry capacity, substantially greater financial, technological, technical, marketing and other resources, broader product lines and longer standing relationships with customers. Our primary competitors include flash chip producers such as Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Atmel Corporation, Hitachi Ltd., Intel Corporation, Micron Technology, Inc., Mitsubishi Electronic Corporation, Samsung Electronics Company Ltd., Sharp Electronics Corporation and Toshiba Corporation. Other competitors include companies using data storage techniques such as socket flash, linear flash and system flash components, as well as package or card assemblers such as Lexar Media, Inc., M-Systems, Inc., Simple Technology Inc., SMART Modular
Technologies, Inc., Sony Corporation, Kingston Technology Company, TDK Corporation, Matsushita Battery, Inc. and Viking Components, Inc., which combine controllers and flash memory chips developed by others into flash storage cards. Over 25 companies have been certified by the CompactFlash Association to manufacture and sell their own brand of CompactFlash. We believe additional manufacturers will enter the CompactFlash market in the future.
In addition, competing products have been introduced that promote industry standards that are different from our CompactFlash product, including Toshiba's Smart Media (Solid-State Floppy Disk Card), Sony Corporation's Memory Stick, Panasonic's recently introduced Mega Storage cards, Iomega's Clik drive, a miniaturized, mechanical, removable disk drive and M-Systems' Diskonchip(TM) for embedded storage applications. Each competing standard is mechanically and electronically incompatible with CompactFlash and MultiMediaCard. If a manufacturer of digital cameras or other consumer electronic devices designs in one of these alternative competing standards, CompactFlash or MultiMediaCard will be eliminated from use in that product.
In September 1998, IBM introduced the microdrive, a rotating disk drive in a type II CompactFlash format. Initially, this product will compete directly with our type II CompactFlash memory cards, which we introduced in the second quarter of 1999, for use in high end professional digital cameras. In October 1998, M-Systems introduced their Diskonchip 2000 Millennium product which is expected to compete against our Flash ChipSet products in embedded storage applications such as set top boxes and networking appliances.
According to independent industry analysts, Sony's Mavica digital camera captured a considerable portion of the United States market for digital cameras in 1998. The Mavica uses a standard floppy disk to store digital images and therefore uses no CompactFlash (or any other flash) cards. Our sales prospects for CompactFlash cards have been adversely impacted by the success of the Mavica. However, we do not believe that the Mavica's market share is increasing. Also, our MultiMediaCard products have faced significant competition from Toshiba's SmartMedia flash cards and are expected to face similarly significant competition from Sony's flash Memory Stick. Although the Memory Stick is proprietary to Sony, if it is adopted and achieves widespread use in future products, sales of our MultiMediaCard and CompactFlash products may decline.
We also face competition from products based on multilevel cell flash technology such as Intel's 64Mbit flash chip and Hitachi's recently introduced 256Mbit flash chip. These products compete with our D2 multilevel cell flash technology. Multilevel cell flash is a technological innovation that allows each flash memory cell to store two bits of information instead of the traditional single bit stored by the industry standard flash technology. In the second quarter of 1999 Intel announced their new 128Mbit multilevel cell chip and Hitachi began shipping customer samples of CompactFlash cards employing their new multilevel cell flash chip. In addition, Toshiba has begun customer shipments of 32 megabyte SmartMedia cards employing their new 256Mbit flash chip. Although Toshiba has not incorporated multilevel cell flash technology in their 256Mbit flash chip, their use of more advanced lithographic design rules may allow them achieve a more competitive cost structure than that of our 256Mbit D2 flash chip.
Furthermore, we expect to face competition from existing companies and from other companies that may enter our existing or future markets that have similar or alternative data storage solutions which may be less costly or provide additional features. Price is an important competitive factor in the market for consumer products. Increased price competition could lower gross margins if our average selling prices decrease faster than costs and could also result in lost sales.
We have entered into patent cross-license agreements with a number of our leading competitors, including, Hitachi, Intel, Samsung, Sharp, SST and Toshiba. Under these agreements, each party may manufacture and sell products that incorporate technology covered by the other party's patents related to flash memory devices. As we continue to license our patents to certain competitors, competition will increase and may cause harm to our business, financial condition and results of operations." |
