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Technology Stocks : Applied Magnetics Corp -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jonathan Bird who wrote (11085)	12/20/1997 9:45:00 AM
From: T Bowl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12298

Jon Bird - APM will also be shipping the 1.3GB TFI head for the next few Qs. I do not know exactly for how long though. Well, it'll last as long as WDC buys them. I do not know of any current APM MR pgms. In the Oct PR, APM mentioned a portable and a high end MR pgm. I have said before that I believed these were the WDC portfolio and a Micropolis pgm. In the 10K APM said MR rev was 4.9% of total 97 FY rev. That gives us the 4Qs of FY97 MR rev as: $7.1mil, $4.6mil, $7.2mil, $5.3mil. FY96 was $6.0mil in MR sales(vol prod started SepQ96). That means they've shjipped $30mil of MR heads, let's call that around 3mil heads. I find it hard to believe that the portfolio and Micropolis pgms actually sold that many. I do not know where the heads went. From the JunQ97 10Q: "The Company's product strategy has been to extend the life of inductive thin film products in the high volume, low cost desktop segment of the market while focusing MR technology on the portable and high capacity market segments where MR technology can be better leveraged." It seems from that statement they were not looking to qual desktop drives in 1997 for MR. Could they have another high-end pgm out there that we do not know about? The WDC high end MR head supplier is TDK I believe. Do they have any other MR products? I do not know of any, but what's that saying? Not much. I was bothered by the fact that APM was not involved in the SEG qual for MR heads. Why would that be? If they had the ability/capacity to make MR heads in volumne why wouldn't they have done it? You can see from the 4Qs of MR shipments that they were not growing that segment. todd