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

To: clean86 who wrote (52083)	1/26/2012 2:17:12 AM
From: FJB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

The SSD update didn't sound too bad: Switching to our Enterprise SSD business, we delivered strong sequential revenue growth in the fourth quarter. Our sales in this new market stems from the leadership of our SAS SSDs and our vertically integrated business model. Today, SanDisk is a leading supplier of SAS SSDs to Tier 1 storage and server customers. Customer response to ourSSD solutions has been very favorable, and our Enterprise SSDs remain on plan to migrate to our captive memory beginning the second quarter of this year. We are further expanding our product portfolio with our PCIe and SATA SSD products, both of which we have already started sampling to Enterprise customers. Overall, I'm very excited about SanDisk's growth prospects in the enterprise market and expect to see accelerating momentum in 2012. For the Client SSD market, the combination of the increasingly attractive price point and the significantly improved user experience is fueling consumers' transition to SSDs from hard disk drives. We have been successful with our small form factor client SSD, and now they are being increasingly adopted by PC OEMs into their newer tablet platforms in both stand-alone SSD and caching configuration. We have also begun sampling our high-performance client SSDs at PC OEMs. Our Client solutions offer compelling value propositions to our customers. Our innovative systems solutions deliver industry-leading power and performance characteristics in the smallest package footprint. To achieve this, requires D [ph] system design and implementation capabilities, and these are part of SanDisk's core strengths. To conclude my comments on SSDs, we expect 2012 to mark the inflection point of SSD growth for SanDisk, with both the Enterprise and Client markets becoming strong contributors to our revenue growth in 2012 and beyond.

To: clean86 who wrote (52083)	1/26/2012 11:09:10 AM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Re: Why Apple isn't buying much from SanDisk. You may recall that Eli mentioned on numerous occasions that SanDisk was not interested in dropping the price of its 3-bit NAND units, even though they were less expensive than equivalent MLC chips. Seems to me that SanDisk's policy is to keep product prices as high as possible in order to create higher product gross margins. That policy would run counter to what Apple does; namely, to search out the lowest price component suppliers. And the fact that SanDisk is delaying completion of Fab 5 again suggests that the strategy of maintaining high product prices is more important to management than a strategy of increasing unit volume, albeit at lower profit margins. As to a client SSD, I would broaden that view to include ALL PRODUCTS. SanDisk, as far as I can see, has no products that distinguish themselves sufficiently from the competition, either in performance or price. The lack of a clearly superior product makes SanDisk just another run-of-the-mill producer and also helps explain why companies like Apple do better. Art