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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: moose who wrote (39068)	12/9/1997 12:43:00 PM
From: IGL	Respond to of 58324

Companies In The News Iomega Takes Aim At Market For Portable-Device Memory Investors Business Daily, Tuesday, December 09, 1997 at 12:12 Premier products with catchy titles and low prices have made Iomega Corp. a big name in data storage for home and office computers. But Iomega's latest product - Clik - focuses on portable PCs, phones and cameras. This should help it zoom in on new markets while widening sales of existing equipment. "Clik takes us out of the PC market, which broadens our technology base," said Iomega's CFO, Leonard Purkis. The company's removable hard drives and disks, Zip and Jaz, have solved many data storage problems for PC users. Its installed base includes 12 million Zip- and 1 million Jaz-drive users. Products are sold to consumers in stores and to computer makers. The success of these products has lifted the company's revenue from $141 million in 1994 to more than $1.2 billion for the first nine months of this year. Iomega hopes for the same results with its new portable disk drive. "Potentially Clik can be bigger than Zip," said Stan Corker of Emerald Research. "I see Clik having immediate market opportunities," Corker said. That's because the new portable disk drive provides memory at a good price. More Memory, New Markets Clik has been designed to expand the memory of smaller high-tech products such as hand-held computers, smart cellular phones and digital cameras. Clik's drive is tiny enough to fit in a wallet. Its disk is no bigger than a folded credit card but holds 40 megabytes of data. This is 30 times the space on a floppy disk. Shipments of Clik should begin in mid-1998. Just as Zip has fast become favored by PC users over floppy disks, Iomega looks to make Clik a favorable alternative to flash-memory cards, which are widely used in portable electronics. Flash cards are slightly larger than Clik and can be plugged into notebook computers and digital cameras. Both technologies have pros and cons. Because they don't use a disk, flash cards can process data faster than Clik. But most flash cards hold only about 10 megabytes of data. That helps Clik. In digital cameras, for example, pictures are stored in memory instead of on film and produce higher-quality images. But only a dozen photos can exhaust a flash card's memory. To free up room, flash-card images have to be downloaded onto a PC. This method is time-consuming but cheaper than buying a new flash card, which costs several hundred dollars. With four times the storage of flash cards, Clik lets users snap more pictures. Clik drives are expected to cost about $200 each, the disks only $10 apiece. The two products should co-exist in the PC, camera and other high- tech markets, analysts say. But lots of industry players are endorsing Clik. Leonard Purkis On Nov. 13, when the product was introduced, Japanese electronics giant Matsushita said it would make and use the Clik drives in some of its products. Other endorsers include LSI Logic Corp., Hewlett Packard Co., Motorola Inc. and Eastman Kodak Co. But for now Iomega's bread and butter is still Zip. Because it's removable, the company's hard drive lets PC users organize files and create unlimited hard-drive space. Performance and price help Zip. For example, Zip Plus, Iomega's recent upgrade of Zip, functions 50 times as fast as a floppy drive in Windows 95. A regular Zip drive sells for about $100 compared with $200 for products made by Imation Corp. and SyQuest Technology Inc. Likewise, at $15 each, Iomega's Zip disks are up to $15 cheaper than those of rivals, though they store less. Worldwide, Zip drives make up 89% of the $1.5 billion dollar removable disk-drive market. The Zip's nearest competitor is Imation's LS-120 drive with an installed base of 1 million. The Zip drive's popularity and high margins, of 80%, have brought out the copycats. Earlier this year Nomai, a French company, put out what it said was a Zip-compatible disk. But Iomega took it to court and was able to restrict sale of Nomai disks. The company has also redesigned the Zip disk to prevent future cloning attempts. The court battles with Nomai shouldn't affect Iomega's earnings growth, analysts say. While Zip is geared toward consumers, Jaz is aimed at the business market. Jaz has one gigabyte of storage and works faster than Zip. It's priced at $299 per drive and $99 for a disk. Syquest unveiled SparQ, a one gigabyte drive similar to Jaz costing only $199 last month. But it may have arrived too late. "Professional users will pay the higher price for Jaz. It has very quickly become the de facto standard in the professional market," Corker said.