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

To: slacker711 who wrote (26874)	10/21/2004 9:34:27 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Looks like a direct competitor to Transflash.... globes.co.il M-Systems' new baby The market has yet to appreciate the significance of MegaSIM. Gitit Pincas 20 Oct 04 20:57 Shares of M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers (Nasdaq:FLSH) hardly reacted yesterday to one of the company's most interesting announcements in months. The company confirmed the report in "Globes" at the beginning of the month that it planned to launch a flash-based SIM card for mobile telephones. This is a completely new market for the company, one that could generate substantial revenue. Current SIM cards have only a tiny memory, enough to store a diary, contacts, games, and a few programs. If the customer wants a larger memory, he or she can, with some handsets, buy a flash memory card as an add-on. The MegaSIM, M-Systems new product, will change this picture, and it will be a world first. The card will initially offer subscribers capacity of 16-256 mb. This is a mini-revolution, as such an amount of memory will make possible a range of different applications and functions on one card. In addition, it will enable the security level for all applications to be raised. The rationale behind the move is that, since every mobile telephone has room for a SIM card, there is no reason not t exploit it for memory purposes. "We have been working on development of the product since the beginning of the year," says M-Systems CFO Ronit Maor, "The lion's share of the work was on marketing - going to the market and seeing that there was indeed a need or such a product. Once we found out that telecommunications operators, who are our customers, were interested in it, we started developing the product. I estimate that the final total for the development cost will be a few million dollars." Maor adds that the product was not easy to develop, unlike the Disk-On-Key, for example. "The product's potential is amazing, and, on paper, we have a very large market, even larger than those for the Mobile-Disk-On-Chip and Disk-On-Key," she says. Sales will start in 2006. According to M-Systems, the card will be ready for commercial use in the second half of 2005. Analysts expect that more than 800 million SIM cards will be sold globally in 2004. For anyone who thinks this number is high, since there are not more than 500 million mobile telephones in the world, the company points out that, in the Far East, there are subscribers with more than one SIM card in their handsets. Amit Yonay of Ing Financial Markets says the announcement is a significant one for the company. He mentions another angle to the story, concerning M-Systems collaborator-competitor SanDisk. "This move hobbles SanDisk," he says, "They are putting expanded memory onto the SIM card that mobile telephone companies need anyway, so that removable memory, such as SanDisk produces, will become unnecessary for mobile handsets." On the day Disk-On-Key was launched, M-Systems shares fell, so that he company is not worried, and doesn't think the market fails to understand the product. "Next week, when we release our financial results, we'll talk about the product, and then people will understand better." Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on October 20, 2004