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

To: Stitch who wrote (8975)	1/14/2001 8:08:55 PM
From: Yogi - Paul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Stitch, <<Seagate, cut loose from the fetters of SEC rules, is like cutting loose a hungry junkyard dog at a junior league tea party..>> LOL Damn, I've missed reading your posts... Try to find time when possible. <<...how soon do you think we will see warnings from the disk drive makers? >> Soon, very soon but then everyone I talk to feels the same. Always dangerous when everyone agrees. Paul

To: Stitch who wrote (8975)	1/14/2001 8:31:41 PM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

>> Privatization doesn't have anything to do with with tighter supplies. To suggest so is a non sequitur. Right. There is no mandatory cause/effect there. Still we need to explain why there are no seagate desktop drives in the on-line shops. There used to be pages of seagate models ready to ship at Insight and CDW. Now only a few models, and mainly enterprise-type. The only credible explanation I've seen is a post from drivetech2000 on Yahoo Maxtor thread. He asserted (two months ago, and before the absense of seagate drives became obvious) That Seagate would move 1.5 million drives from desktop to enterprise. I have no idea if this makes sense. Can you verify whether this is feasible from production-flexibility point of view ? Anyway, despite the weakness in PC shipments, drive prices are firm ? How to explain ? Two possibilities: (1-) Are people just upgrading drives into old PC's ? Are Europeans and Asians buying PC's made by small shops and bypassing the established names ? (2-) drives are going into non-pc storage devices. My tracking of DD prices shows they are firm and have been for months. So does Mark Madden's survey, which is much more systematic. So now we have two competing hypotheses. 1- DD inventories are building up in secret warehouses and prices will collapse any moment. or 2- DD makers have learned how to tune production to demand, and are therefore less subject to price collapse. If that is the case, some of the restraint had to come from seagate. My 70k shares of DD stocks like the 2nd idea. As a point of curiosity, today I priced a new pc for my home. At both Compaq and Dell, the upgrade from 10GB drive to 20GB is $77 and $50, respectively. Just confirms tightness of supply. In the old days, they'd be giving the upgrade as a free incentive. The key assumption from your vantage point is this: Nevertheless we know inventories in PC land have been growing. With PCs still accounting for most of the disk drives ... Since the conclusion that flows from it: "how soon do you think we will see warnings from the disk drive makers? " has not occurred. And is not going to occur for Q4, then it seems the assumption needs to be re-examined. Maybe Gateway is not representative of the DD business! Regards, Sarmad EDIT: his projection for Seagate units was : "SEG is going to ship 12.5M+ drives this quarter. Their SCSI and Fiber channel are doing extremely well." Does that sound reasonable ? Thanks.