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Technology Stocks : Western Digital (WDC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pierre-X who wrote (7604)	11/14/1997 4:22:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11057

Pierre-X, "The big question is, what is Fujitsu doing with respect to pricing? Will they continue to price aggressively in pursuit of market share? Will they expand the battle front to the higher capacity points? The next big question is, what is Samsung planning? They hae publicly stated that they intend to achieve No. 3 drivemaker status in 2 years." I agree with you completely. But, frankly, I don't know how to find out with any certainty what Fujitsu or Samsung is planning. I am not privy to their ambitions or the means they are willing to use to achieve those ambitions. Samsung may want to be number 3 by 2000, but how do they want to get there? How much money are they willing to lose to achieve that goal? It won't be easy, because the top 3 independent vendors are all pretty tough competitors who have been there before, not to mention IBM. There are several ways to get market share in a market like drives. One way is compete on price. Another way is to offer something that the competition doesn't offer--higher speed, greater reliability, longer warranty, easier interface, whatever may be significant to them. Another way is to see what the trend is, get to the next place before the competition does, and convince your customers that they want/need this now (e.g., fibre channel, gmr, whatever). In any case, I'm glad you are "busting your ass to delve into this issue." Best wishes, Sam

To: Pierre-X who wrote (7604)	11/14/1997 5:10:00 PM
From: kenteen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11057

Pierre-X, I appreciated your post on the WDC annual meeting yesterday and was hoping that someone would post a take on the sentiment at the meeting. Apparently, based on the stock price action today things went well. I keep wondering about the efficacy of moving to MR. I tended to agree with Crissman of APM that the technology could not move that fast. In thinking about it, I still wonder whether the double sensors on the heads required for MR can be compensated by the added bits per area. It seems to be a very expensive gamble. Would the yeilds be an indicator? My we all recover our losses.