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

To: Thomas Haegin who wrote (7914)	12/2/1997 1:12:00 PM
From: kormac	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11057

Thomas and others. Last week I had a chance to go a seminar on disk drive technology given by a fellow from IBM. Unfortunately I could not corner him for long enough to get amny of my questions answered. As you might expect I came away from the talk thinking that IBM is a fromidable player in the HDD market, having recently introduced the GMR technology. Some interesting things I learned form this talk are: Gross margins: 15-40 % typically 30%. Product life: 12-14 months 60% areal continuous growth density. Highest density today is 6Gbytes/in^2. 20Mbytes/sec data rate today. Need to get this up tyo 50Mbytes/sec for full-motion-video. 125M drives to be shipped this year with 25% growth rate. $30B revenues for the industry. Furture advances in integrated head/suspensions. MEMS like devices being researched today. I held WDC this summer. In at $39 outr at $48. In at $36 out at $24 after new warning and day before IBM announced the GMR product. IBM is a formidable competitor in this field right now and is sure to increase its market share. BTW. I think Maxtor is owned by Huyndai. I don't know the loaction of all the factories of the various companies, but the weakness in Korean won ought to help Maxtor. IBM has a very large factory in Hungary. Regards, Seppo