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Technology Stocks : QUANTUM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T Bowl who wrote (5937)	12/2/1997 8:03:00 PM
From: John Ritter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9124

Should I sell in the AM?

To: T Bowl who wrote (5937)	12/2/1997 10:36:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 9124

I gree with some of your assumptions, namely that GMs will tend to tract among DD mfgs. but disagree completely on the notion that WDC, Segate and Quantum are tracking on the same product cycle. That's the big differential for Quantum and why their DD numbers have looked so impressive lately - they have transitioned ahead of WDC and SEG to convert their lines to MR and UDMA. The differences were very evident in comparing statements made by Quantum and Western Digital in their last quarterly conference calls: Quantum said that they were very pleased with the ramp up on their new drives and conversions to MR heads and correlated higher density platters. On the other hand, WDc managemnet said that the pace of the conversion of the industry had caught them by surprise and that they would be trying to change over as quickly as posible. Quantum and Fujitsu have been killing WDC and SEG. If you can build drives that have better performance and are more in demand using fewer components and lower cost Japanese assembly partners, and have gone through almost all of the assembly line conversions, then you can relatively kick butt. It seems to me that Quantum will see narrower margins in the desktop DD business that will effect the bottom line this quarter by 10c-15c. That's just a guesstimate based on what I can see in DD prices at the retail level. The retail market is down 20%-40% over just the last 60 days with the biggest hits being taken on the out-of-date product being dumped by WDC and SEG. If that is how it turns out, then the current stock price remains super low.