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

To: SBHX who wrote (20325)	5/24/2001 6:20:05 PM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 60323

Scared, You said... "On the CF modules themselves. I'm wondering if having too high a market penetration is a mixed blessing. If the flash modules become ubiquitous, they can be thought of the same way as floppy disks, where there is no brand loyalty at all... This means that sndk's original advantage as being THE name in flash modules may have been weakened." I think it would be great if CF became ubiquitous, but this has not been realized. If you examine digital camera sales right now you can probably assume that Sony will command 20% of the market, so one-fifth of sales will lead to a Memory Stick sale or an alternative to flash (floppy). Olympus, Fuji and other SmartMedia supporters will probably command another 30-40% or so of the market, with Olympus leading the way by a long shot. The remainder of the market probably will belong to Nikon, Canon, Kodak... who are supporting CompactFlash. The CompactFlash standard may represent 40+% of the total digital camera market. Divide that by the number of CF manufacturers and you begin to see how important brand name will be. Will cost or will performance or will brand recognition drive the majority of consumer sales? Who knows? Recall that BestBuy sold a very large percentage of digital cameras to the US consumer. That leads one to believe that the relationship one develops with retailers could be critical as the market begins to develop. I think the push will need to be in capturing retail shelves and striking deals with on-line retailers to be exclusive or near-exlusive suppliers. But, unfortunately I don't see what would motivate retailers, either e-tail or brick-'n'-mortar, to marry themselves to a single manufacturer. Somehow I thought '987 would solve all of our problems, but it is becoming clearer that '987 isn't bullet-proof. Lexar's successful licensing deals is a testimony to that. Ausdauer