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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (49097)	7/12/2001 11:53:03 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 70976

OT storage: Over the last 10 years, there are many companies (lots of venture capital, lots of established companies, especially the server companies), who have seen the high growth and high margins in storage, and tried to get a piece of the action. HDS, a unit of Hitachi, is one of a long list. As a general rule, most tech niches are winner-take-all, with one company sucking up most of the available profits. The only good investments are in companies who are #1, or have a good plan for becoming #1. For the NAS and SAN niches, that's EMC and NTAP. Everyone else is an also-ran. EMC has a decade-long track record of beating the also-rans. Also: I only buy U.S. companies, as a rule. Foreign (especially Japanese) reporting rules are even more opaque than U.S. GAAP and "pro forma" are. A lot of Japanese companies have huge debts on the books, that have been uncollectible for a decade, and they have yet to tell their stockholders about it. Who knows what disaster is lurking in the Byzantine books of an old conglomerate like Hitachi? We could take this discusion to the EMC thread, there are people there who know the sector a lot better than I do (like Gus).