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

To: Sam who wrote (7609)	11/14/1997 4:55:00 PM
From: John Wang	Respond to of 11057

Sam: I checked into Fujitsu and Samsung websites trying to dig any info. I cannot get much from either site. However, I seem to get the following impressions: 1) Fujitsu's first MR program is 2.1G/platter just like WDC. And, they bragged about it in the web site. 2) Samsung's technology seem to be one generation behind WDC's. However, recent RDRT's announcement indicates that they will start to ship 2.1G/p MR heads to Samsung later this month. So, Samsung is about three months behind. 3) Currently, their highest capacity drives use 1.7G/p. It may be APM's TFI heads. If so, their HDD yields may not be good on these particular drives. 4) Samsung seems to have reasonable lineup for $1000 PC type of drives. I don't know how they can try to be #3 by Y2000. Engineering talents for HDD design are needed. There are not too many out there compared with DRAM design. Nobody knows why Fujitsu started this run of price war. Maybe, they see the big Christmas season as the best season to gain market share. Maybe, they are trying to react to Samsung's ambitious claim and trying to kill Samsung to prevent Samsung from gaining market share. Japanese has long memory of how their DRAM shares got taken away by Samsung and other Korean DRAM houses. This time, they may want to kill Samsung before Samsung grows up. Samsung is probably losing money on DRAM like most of DRAM houses. Fujitsu may want to let them taste the same for the HDD business. John