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

To: Ron Bower who wrote (2683)	12/6/1997 3:21:00 PM
From: Stewart Whitman	Respond to of 78595

Ron, The actual price of flash chips is probably going to fall somewhat like DRAM. The Japanese manufacturers are going to shift resources away from lower margin DRAM: techweb.com That said, one would think that a flash card manufacturer, link SanDisk, should be independant of those price drops. I would think it would remain robust for some years because of the consumer demand for non-volatile storage. Look at their recent release for Compaq: biz.yahoo.com There's no reason that a consumer buying a 10Mb flash disk won't want higher capacity disks as the handheld and their applications improve in usability and flexibility. FLSHF is interesting, because it stresses the larger capacity flash disks. It talks about capacities beyond 50Mb, but if you look at the cost of those devices right now, you're talking about a lot of money, if their 8 Mb chip goes for $56, what are those higher capacity chips going for. Don't get me wrong, they have definite market in some mission critical applications where cost is not an object and the MTBF of a mechanical disk is too low. And they seem to have some very good embedded motherboard manufacturers signed up. For the longer term, I'd really look carefully at how they're business would change if flash producers dropped prices to a 1/4 of what they are today. Stew