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To: chaz who wrote (8325)	10/15/1999 7:50:00 AM
From: John Stichnoth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Re Sony's flash--Theirs is actually a proprietary item called the "Memory Stick". It is competitive with Sandisk. What has people excited about Sandisk is that "all" of the third parties are signing up to use their version. Sony's version seems to be standing out there all by itself (do I hear "Betamax" here?) Best, JS

To: chaz who wrote (8325)	10/15/1999 8:36:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 54805

I don't think Sony uses SNDK. The new Sony I saw recently uses a floppy diskette.

To: chaz who wrote (8325)	10/15/1999 11:20:00 AM
From: StockHawk	Respond to of 54805

A little SNDK info re: earthquake effect SNDK closed at 88 3/4 on 9/20/99. The stock had been moving up strongly until mid-August and was in a basing pattern for about 5 weeks when news of the Taiwan earthquake broke. At the time SNDK was in the process of doing a secondary stock offering, but that was postponed. A post on the SNDK thread summed up the concern: Message 11311324 Tuesday, Sep 21 1999 8:44AM ET Reply # of 7700 "The new shares on the market could easily drop the stock price somewhat. But more important in my view is the potential effect of an earthquake in Taiwan this morning, a very large quake whose epicenter seems to be close to the industrial park where SNDK has a factory making CF. If production is halted for any long period, particularly with the holiday season coming up, it could momentarily affect SNDK profits and cause the stock to drop a lot more than just issuing new shares. " The stock began to fall on 9/21 but the decline accelerated on 9/23 when SNDK closed at $65. At this point SNDK had not issued any statement on the quake's effect and the silence may have worried some people. SNDK did issue a statement on 9/28 zacks.newsalert.com "The latest information that we have is that the damage to the USC and USIC wafer fabs of the UMC Group where we manufacture our 128Mbit and 256Mbit flash wafers has been significantly less severe than originally estimated. Power at the UMC Group has been restored and 90 percent of the fab machinery has already returned to production. "Initial assessments are that between 8 and 10 percent of the SanDisk wafers in processing will have to be scrapped. We expect shipments of production wafers to resume in the next 2 to 3 days. "Assuming that the production interruption at UMC Group is contained to less than two weeks, which now appears to be the case, and that there are no significant power interruptions or major new aftershocks, we expect to be able to use our existing inventory of wafers and die bank to make up for the temporary shortfall of wafers in the fourth quarter. "The other major facility in Taiwan, at SPIL, where we do the majority of our MultiMediaCard assembly is now fully back in production. " The stock continued to slide, closing at $54 on 10/4 and then it rebounded somewhat touching $70 on 10/7. Concerns about the quarterly report caused the stock to take a tumble on 10/13. It closed at $46 1/4 on a big spike in volume. The report released after the close stated that the earthquake, while not effecting the quarter they were reporting on, would effect the following quarter. A few highlights: zacks.newsalert.com Total third quarter revenues increased $35.5 million, or 111%, Bookings have been exceptionally strong in all geographic areas, amounting to 2.5 times the record bookings we recorded in the previous quarter. We are booked for the fourth quarter and have a strong backlog for the first quarter of 2000. "Taiwan is back to normal production. The recent earthquake did not impact our third quarter results. The financial impact of the earthquake is expected to be confined to the fourth quarter and manifest itself primarily in terms of spot shortages and increased expediting costs. We currently believe that the fourth quarter megabytes shipped will exceed megabytes shipped in the third quarter. However, the projected quarter over quarter growth in revenues will be lower than the growth rate experienced in the third quarter. In the first quarter of 2000, we anticipate improved margins due to the higher pricing we instituted on new orders. The shift to the more productive 256Mbit technology should also help to significantly increase product availability in the first quarter of 2000. The report also showed EPS of 21 cents, which met expectations and compared to 9 cents in the prior year, a 133% increase. In general the report appeared positive, they were selling all they could make, they were fully booked for the coming quarter and they expected price increase to kick in and volume to increase as supply constraints were eliminated (sound like tornado symptoms). However, the earthquake effect seemed to be what caught investors attention and the stock dropped in the night market. The next day (yesterday) the stock opened down and got as low as $37 3/4 before rebounding sharply to close at $54. While a typical day might see half a million shares traded, more than 8 million traded on 10/14 representing a substantial portion of the float. In the same time period that the stock dropped from the high 80's to the high 30's most of the fundamental news about the company seemed rather positive. Of course, when a stock price moves up the way SNDK did over the year, any fall will lead people to make statements about "overvaluation" or "getting ahead of itself" or "inevitable correction" but it would appear that the earthquake was responsible for a significant postion of the price drop. StockHawk