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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (45067)	10/20/2011 4:31:02 PM
From: J Mako	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78670

re: WDC > Perhaps it's different in other settings or perhaps I was just lucky. A value investor who doesn't have risk control? ;-) I don't replace my HDD when it fails. I replace it before that happens. (Just like you sell your stocks before they are fully valued.) Maybe I'm the minority and not everyone thinks like me... > What percentage of manufacturing is affected? How much the sales will drop? If they can't fulfill orders for a year, this is bad in terms of competitive position... IIRC, sales will be halved and they acknowledged they would get into negative gross margin next quarter. And the quarter after will be worse because their inventories will run out. The CEO emphasized a few times this will affect them for "a few quarters". They have factories in Malaysia. But it appears there is that much they can shift there. And they've decided they wouldn't use their R&D capacity for manufacturing. They have yet had the full assessment of the damage at this point.

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (45067)	10/20/2011 6:57:59 PM
From: J Mako	Respond to of 78670

re: WDC > You are right that SSD won't replace everything, but if the question is how much they can replace. If the percentage is significant (20%+?) HDD manufacturers will suffer. I look at it this way. In a PC, you currently have RAM and Level 1 and Level 2 cache on the CPU. The presence of these high speed cache memories doesn't replace your RAM because there is a persistent price gap. In a similar fashion, in the desktop and laptop systems, I foresee it will be standard to have one SSD and one HDD, (or a hybrid integrated drive), with the SSD catering for system files and swap space. In the data centers and enterprises, the exponential growth of data volume and size will definitely require HDD. Probably the only wildcard is whether the saving in power consumption, which is significant in data centers -- that's why Google builds its data centers next to hydro power stations -- can compensate for the premium one pays for the SSD. I think the fear of SSD replacing HDD is overplayed.