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

To: Michael Kim who wrote (18530)	1/25/2001 12:33:29 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Name me one tech company that's got "visibility" for the rest of the year.SNDK makes money and sells at a reasonable PE.

To: Michael Kim who wrote (18530)	1/25/2001 6:58:45 AM
From: orkrious	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

royalties of $15 million per qtr - what's that about? Michael, Eli was asked about this specifically in the CC. Essentially, he said he is being conservative and last year they had several new up front payments for licensing agreements-he isn't including any in this number. He also said that negotiations are ongoing in with several card manufacturers. Further, he said it is their position that the '987 patent applies to MMC and SD cards. Listen to the replay. For the first time they have one. Jay

To: Michael Kim who wrote (18530)	1/25/2001 7:50:38 AM
From: Ausdauer	Respond to of 60323

Aus, any take on the licensing revenue situation? I mean royalties of $15 million per qtr - what's that about? The argument made during the c.c. was that there were a number of licensees that had been paying a fixed license that transitioned to a revenue-based license. The revenue base for this calculation must have been significantly less than expected. I also wonder if the recent deals with Toshiba (the JV) and the renewed Hitachi license (which I believe includes a right of first refusal on the latest Hitachi flash chip) may include a reduced license. Eli mentioned that '987 licenses are being negotiated, both on CompactFlash and the MMC/SDMC fronts. I am still upset that no formal announcements have been made. We have been waiting several quarters for the news. My take on the c.c was that SanDisk grew extraordinarily fast in 2000 and now they need to take a breather. For example, they earned 41¢ in the just finished quarter vs. 43¢ in all of 1999. Total EPS more than tripled in 2000 over 1999 and total revenues exceeded $600 million. The fall in OEM turns sales at the end of December really created a problem for us. Eli didn't say it, but Kodak must have lost a large piece of the digital camera pie. That leaves Canon, HP and Nikon as the other major digital camera vendors supporting SanDisk. Panasonic and JVC have been good supporters of MMC. Compaq and a number of MP3 manufactures have also been supporting MMC. The inventory issue looms over us for the next 3 to 6 months. Eli and Frank indicated that the majority of this is raw materials and that the wafer is a high-end product. Hopefully they can fine tune the product mix to prevent an inventory write-off in future quarters. Eli seemed upbeat about the second half of the year. I hope his enthusiasm plays out as he anticipates. Several new products will be released that use SanDisk MMC and SDMC. He must have some idea about the potential of these items, both from a consumer point of view and from the OEM demand point of view. Aus