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To: Gottfried who wrote (6843)	12/19/1997 1:14:00 PM
From: T Bowl	Respond to of 9124

<<Don't know why StorMedia is buying them>> Me either. STMD was already operating at 30% capacity.. Anybody have any idea how big they were? todd

To: Gottfried who wrote (6843)	12/20/1997 10:44:00 PM
From: Sheba	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9124

Here's the San Jose Mercury story on Akashic. You do not know how lucky you are to have a decent newspaper. I subscribe to the SJMercury online because my local newspaper is only fit to line my snake cages. Disk drive ills hit home for 750 Akashic: Component maker announces layoffs as drive makers cut orders. BY TOM QUINLAN Mercury News Staff Writer San Jose-based Akashic Memories Corp. confirmed Thursday that it has laid off 750 employees, in a clear signal that hard times in the disk drive industry are starting to hit home. Akashic, which is in the process of being sold by Kubota Corp. to Santa Clara-based StorMedia Inc., blamed the layoffs from this past weekend on lower-than-expected orders from some of its major customers, including Seagate Technologies Inc. and Western Digital. Earlier this month, Seagate announced it was closing its manufacturing facility in Ireland, and Western Digital told analysts it was cutting back production on some of its disk drives, as over-production of hard drives has led to an oversupply of the storage devices, along with falling prices. Both companies buy drive components from Akashic, and Seagate represents more than 70 percent of StorMedia's business, according to that company's most recent financial reports. ''I think the layoffs surprised us and surprised Akashic,'' said StorMedia Chairman and CEO William Almon, who indicated that platter manufacturer StorMedia's deal to buy Akashic is still expected to close by the end of this year. It's not the first surprise StorMedia has had recently. The company already had to consolidate some of its offshore facilities when disk drive manufacturer Micropolis Inc. closed down. Micropolis was expected to account for as much as 19 percent of StorMedia's business. Even before Micropolis closed its doors, 1997 had been a rough year for StorMedia. The company's revenues for the first nine months had dropped by almost half, to $86 million from $160 million for the year earlier period. ''What all of this says is that the downturn that we had known was coming is much more serious then we had thought,'' Almon said. ''All we can do right now is kind of hunker down and try to weather it,'' he added. 'I think the combined company will come out of it with renewed vigor.'' Officials of the privately held Akashic wouldn't say how many employees the company still has, although former employees that were among those let go over this past weekend put the figure at around 3,000. Akashic President and CEO Ronald Ritchie said this figure was high, however. As part of the layoffs, Akashic consolidated some of its operations in the San Jose area, closing two plants in the process, Ritchie said. Akashic -- the Sanskrit word for the pictorial record of all thoughts, feelings, words and actions since the beginning of time -- still operates four facilities in the South Bay, and continues to run at least one plant in the Far East in conjunction with Kubota, of Japan. Both StorMedia and Akashic are involved in providing products -- primarily the magnetic disks that the data are actually stored on -- to hard drive manufacturers. Their problems were to be expected given the general distress of the industry, said Jim Porter, founder of the market research firm Disk/Trend Inc. in Mountain View. ''Neither one of these companies are among the largest, and when you have a Seagate closing down a plant, and a Western Digital downgrading their expectations, then you're going to have a ripple effect,'' Porter noted. Whether it was expected, the timing and suddenness of Akashic's decision caught its affected employees by surprise. ''They did this with absolutely no warning,'' complained one former employee. ''They just decided it over the weekend, and suddenly we didn't have a job. And doing it two weeks before Christmas was particularly surprising.'' According to some of the company's former employees, the laid-off workers received 60 days' pay at a minimum, with additional money depending on how long they had worked for Akashic.