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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (13968)	8/16/2000 12:08:11 PM
From: orkrious	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

consanquinety Aus, I had to look that one up. <G> Jay

To: Ausdauer who wrote (13968)	8/16/2000 12:14:31 PM
From: G_Barr	Respond to of 60323

Here's an example of the kind of shallow analysis that SNDK is dealing with these days. streetsideinvestor.com Does It Really Got Game? by Andrew Pearlman back The player is dominating on a below-average professional sports franchise. He leads his team in scoring, is complemented thoroughly on his effort and focus. Makes an all-star team. Signs a big contract. Gets traded to another team missing that one essential key piece which he represents. The team that traded him becomes better, the team that acquired him falls apart. This happens so incredibly often in professional sports. Coaches get sacked for it, but someone else is usually to blame. Sometimes the player is the person required to get the points, so they play above their ability. When put together with a team that already has that go-to person, their intensity decreases. Other times, they just were not that good in the first place, with key role players on their former team covering up for their deficiencies or the opposing team playing down to their level. What sometimes happens though, is that the team that they play for is annoyed at him and plays without energy because they know he’s the star and is going to grab all the attention. One of the areas that recently got notice are the flash memory companies. Flash memory is used when a product needs to be able to store information quickly, cheaply, and with low amounts of weight and power consumption. Silicon Storage(Nasdaq:SSTI) and SanDisk (Nasdaq:SNDK) are both pure-plays in the flash memory field. They have what other companies need badly, particularly for cell phones. Despite this, they both recently took big hits to their stock prices, even with great earnings and future orders. Recently, much of the speculation about them being hit is due to a lack of demand for new handsets. SSTI repudiated this, pointing out that they only got 2% of their revenue from handsets. Sports and stock metaphors have been together for a while, and this is one of the reasons for why this happens. Both of the companies are obviously incredibly successful at what they do. They perhaps might even make a key addition to a larger semiconductor company. That SSTI said what it did is meaningless. It has fabulous earnings in a field that everyone used to consider insignificant. Creating flash memory requires engineering skill, but it is the type of problem which requires cash, not a breakthrough unique to the field itself. The reason that handset sales are disturbing to flash memory is that there are a whole bunch of other players building capacity as a response to not being able to get enough product and due to the ramping demand of all technology products. If demand slows, where exactly are these companies going to sell the product they made? Does SSTI only having 2% of revenue in handsets mean the companies building out won’t go after SSTI’s markets where SSTI is making so much money? Five years from now, what will SSTI or SNDK be selling to not just make the money that they are making now, but so as to grow their earnings? Will they still be making solely flash memory and does it represent a long-term viable product? SSTI and SNDK are stars because no one else thought to really compete with them. That will change next year and then they will get to prove whether or not they are companies for the long-term or stocks to be foisted off on somebody else. The prices of SSTI and SNDK represented a pretty good option trade on Nasdaq at its low a couple of weeks ago, which is why I am long the August 60 for SNDK. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Pearlman is a freelance writer in New York City. Andrew has a science and technology background that gives him a sense about the underlying issues. At the time of publication Andrew held a position in SanDisk . The information in this column under no circumstances serves as a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

To: Ausdauer who wrote (13968)	8/16/2000 2:43:30 PM
From: JRI	Respond to of 60323

Aus or anyone...a couple weeks ago there was a post in which CEO of SanDisk was quoted as saying the addressable market (according to his forecasts) would be x dollars in a certain, several-year timeframe.......I believe, 2005.... Anyone remember what the exact quote was and/or dollar figure?....I seem to recall him saying a 34 Billion dollar (in 2005) addressable market...Thank you in advance...I couldn't find it...

To: Ausdauer who wrote (13968)	8/16/2000 7:25:49 PM
From: Steve 667	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 60323

Aus or anyone who knows, Wily on this thread posted a very interesting article about MRAM a few days ago. (13847) One part of it read: Flash memory is hard-wired onto a chip, but its contents can be erased and rewritten electrically. Flash is not considered fast enough or durable enough to serve as a computer's main memory, said Charles C. Morehouse, director of the Information Technology Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, Calif. Flash chips break down gradually. I haven't heard of this "breaking down" phenomenon before. In fact I was under the impression that flash cards were just the opposite, that they would, for all practical purposes, last a lifetime. Does anyone know anything about this "breaking down" thing concerning CF? Steve 667