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To: Sam who wrote (7911)	12/2/1997 11:15:00 AM
From: Pierre-X	Respond to of 11057

Re: IMF Bailout of Korea Actually it's not clear that Samsung is really much of a threat. Most of the DD vendors and retailers I've talked to indicate that the drives are not that popular or price competitive. On another tack, I don't think Samsung's DD business will be affected in the short term by liquidity infusions from the IMF -- they seem to have already made a big investment in DD, and spent what they were going to spend. The Japanese co's represent a bigger current threat, imho. NEC, Toshiba (which is exclusively 2.5" notebook drives), and especially, Fujitsu. I'm beginning to see NEC desktop drives appear at computer swap meets, where I've never seen them before. You have an interesting, and, I think valid point about Korean business. I'm not expert in what goes on over there but, like Japan, clearly a lot of government "facilitation" happens to push businesses in certain directions. In the long run, this type of central direction hurts the country by interfering with market forces . . . and may hurt trading partners as well, which is your point as I understand it. However Samsung as a company is involved in many many lines of business and they are not now nor have ever been a significant force in the DD industry. With the company apparently in trouble as indicated by their divestiture of certain product lines, I think they have dim prospects of future DD significance. PX