Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Hutchinson Technology, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Z Analyzer who wrote (1390)	12/1/1999 2:32:00 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 1487

<<HTCH begins shipping TSA to SEG in Dec with significant volume by March. HTCH believes SEG will transition almost completely to TSA.>> Now that is surely interesting, and is news to me. Apparently it is also news to sellers and buyers of the stock, since there don't appear to be many of the latter and too many of the former. Further, seagate themselves have given no public indication of this, at least. I obviously hope it is true, though. If so, we should see another great move out of HTCH in the first few months of next year.

To: Z Analyzer who wrote (1390)	12/1/1999 2:58:00 PM
From: Mark Oliver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1487

This is pretty strong information. Can you flesh it out a little bit? Are you finding any chance that the new consumer drives are going to bring anything out of the norm to Hutch? I bought a Tivo player, but plan to return it. It's just not that amazing that I want to pay $500, and it's still not got a big enough hard drive. The guy I spoke to in customer service said they thought these machines would start shipping embedded in TVs. Sony has yet to make their product road map clear, but I expect they will look at various ways to bring these products in play. I think Tivo mostly helps Quantum? Regards, Mark

To: Z Analyzer who wrote (1390)	12/1/1999 3:01:00 PM
From: Tom Simpson	Respond to of 1487

Oops....careless jargon on my part. I think you are right about the term flexure. By "flexure" I meant the electrical traces laid down on upon a flexible, insulated, non-conducting substrate; separate from the metal structure to which it becomes attached. For some reason it bugs me to refer to 4 electrically open unconnected conducting paths as a "circuit", flexible or not. I hope you are right about Seagate. After dropping to 10% of HTCH net sales Dec98 they came back to a more normal 22% for Jun99 qtr which is the last one for which I have the customer breakdown. The interesting thing is that this net sales percentage is closer to 33% when converted to units, i.e. Seagates 28 million dollars at 58 cents a conventional suspension is 50 million units out of 147 million. Convert those to TSA and the Seagate revenue jumps up towards 60-70 million a qtr. By itself that ought yield a couple of dollars a share in annual earnings improvement. But then Yamaha is going away and IBM sure tanked in a hurry so calling this one qtr to qtr is a real dice game. Best...Tom