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

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (8302)	5/1/2000 1:46:00 AM
From: Mark Madden	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Sarmad - <Did you listen to the CC's of WDC, HDD and MXTR ? What do you think?> I am also encouraged by the recent CC's. They all seemed very similar. One of the most important aspects was the appreciation for stable prices. I could almost hear an unspoken agreement that watching inventories and holding prices will help all in the industry prosper. How much they prosper will be dependent on how much they can reduce costs. I also noticed the cautious outlook for the next quarter. Most expected the seasonal factors to take over and reduce demand. This is probably the prudent thing to do because sales in Europe decline in the Summer months. However, they expressed the same cautious outlook last quarter and then gave us a pleasant surprise. They all expressed a positive long range outlook. Maybe we will have a real barn burner in the December quarter. Another interesting thing I picked up is the dual or triple mode demand. There is large demand for cheap drives that will be lower capacity slow drives sold mostly on price. There is also demand for high capacity and high speed drives driven by NAS applications but likely including more sophisticated computer users with frequent use of the Internet. The third area of demand is just emerging. The consumer product demand likes high capacity drives that are slow and quiet. It is nice to see other factors than price driving sales. I do not feel capable at predicting stock prices but I agree next January has the makings of strong price possibilities. Drive makers should be coming off a strong December quarter and the future will look rosy with high growth bandwidth and consumer markets beginning to have impact on profits. Your method of price survey seems much more sensitive to the sweet spot (high sales area) for pricing. Especially with the 10gb per platter drives being the majority of sales last quarter. My method considers too many drives that have price variations due to phasing out or other factors and yet they may have very low sales. The weighting factor I use looks at capacity ranges instead of current capacity ranges being manufactured. Maybe I can come up with an improvement next quarter. I have lots of data to play with. Regards, Mark