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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jfrancis who wrote (7264)	10/27/1999 10:45:00 PM
From: Z Analyzer	Respond to of 9256

<< The question I have is are we going to look back two years from now and only wish we had sold everything to buy disk drive companies, or is technology evolving into something else making companies like htch and seg future dinosaurs.>> Can your boss's phone adequately surf the web or do word processing, store images and tons of data, run other programs and is it versatile? Would you want to read long articles on it? eems to me like a portable supplement. While I see the drive guys continueing to cut each other's throats, I have hopes that HTCH will someday be regarded as having a franchise which enables them to benefit from storage growth. However, pretty soon internet companies probably won't have internet company valuations as we know them today.

To: jfrancis who wrote (7264)	10/27/1999 10:51:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Disk drives aren't becoming obsolete. And demand is growing, not slowing. But capacity has grown with it, and achieving a balance between supply and demand has proven, shall we say, troublesome for the sector. HTCH has been hurt by the growth of single platter drives, which require fewer heads and thus fewer suspensions, as well as by the fact that DD vendors in general are trying to cut the number of heads in their drives via higher areal density. Whether this trend continues, and whether or not growth in high end drives will offset it, is plausibly, IMO, why HTCH has been weak, along with general sector weakness. If HTCH is to grow despite the sector, it will have to show some sign of sustainable profitability, which of late has been lacking. I believe that a consensus of this thread is that the drive sector at large will never get "hot like the internet companies", although they have already gotten cold and so are, at these levels, fairly riskless if you believe that the company you are investing in will survive the next year or two. At least plausibly the sector may at some point yield some good capital gains from these very depressed levels, presuming that some sort of shakeout/consolidation occurs in the sector and independent companies remain key players. Hope that helps a little. Dissenting opinions/perspectives are always welcome. Sam