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

To: uu who wrote (4448)	1/7/1998 6:26:00 PM
From: Bald Man from Mars	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7841

Do you think $10 is the ultimate bottom ???

To: uu who wrote (4448)	1/7/1998 7:21:00 PM
From: Stitch	Respond to of 7841

Addi, What have YOU been smoking? <<does anyone know, or think that it is logical for SEG to start buying its compettitors (sic) in South East Asia now that they are all on sale and dirt cheap and especially in light of all the currency devaluations?>> Mind telling me which of Seagate's competitors are "on sale'. Stitch

To: uu who wrote (4448)	1/7/1998 7:38:00 PM
From: Alok Sinha	Respond to of 7841

Addi, In my opinion Seagate's problem will not get over in one/two quarters. Besides the fact that the DD industry is extremely cyclical, SEG has major execution problems (QNTM would be a better bet I believe, since they will be able to maintain profitability even in the down cycle). I doubt if they will acquire anybody in SE Asia, even though most strong US companies (banks, etc) are pursuing this strategy. Most of SEG's problems stems from poor execution, especiallyin the higher end enterprise class products. To give you an example I became aware of due to my interest in KMAG which derived about 30% of its revenues from SEG in the middle of last year. Back in July last year they cancelled large orders placed with KMAG, which resulted in KMAG's earnings warning which took the stock down from mid 30s to the teens over a 2 week period. The cancellations were based on SEG's expectations that they would be able to manufacture efficiently the thin film disk drives that Komag supplied.Komag diversified its customer base over the subsequent months so that it was not depended on one customer and managed to brekeven in the sep quarter. Towards the end of the quarter SEG realized it would not be able to manufacture the volume of drives it needed to satisfy large orders and began placing large orders with KMAG again - Komag CEO mentioned at the time of quarterly results that the Co. saw substantial recovery in orders in the Dec quarters. It is my belief that SEG lost substantial market share to competitors during their experimentation with internal production and alternate vendors. I have been expecting SEG to come out with an announcement with a shortfall for the last couple of weeks. On the ASND thread I had recommended KMAG to a couple of folks but cautioned that SEG's current quarter woes could pull the sector down in the coming weeks. All that said, I doubt very much that SEG will be seeing 10 soon. There are enough analysts who will be predicting the bottom so that the bottom fishers successively will support the price in mid to high teens. ATML bounced back pretty quickly today after being down to 15. I think QNTM, APM, KMAG may be better value plays in the DD sector which should be down bigtime tomorrow. I got out of my position in SEG back in the 30s based on discussions with an employee friend (who has subsequently quit). Regards Alok P.S. SUNW seems to be holding up relatively well in the current market turmoil. I think it will be strong going into earnings after which there may be some profit taking - but all depends on how the tech market fares.

To: uu who wrote (4448)	1/7/1998 10:57:00 PM
From: Ed Gein	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7841

>>Does anyone know, or think that it is logical for SEG to start buying its compettitors in South East Asia now that they are all on sale and dirt cheap and especially in light of all the currency devaluations? This way they not only assimilate their compettitors but also expand their production cost to that region causing thei cost to go down dramatically (again thanks to all the currency devaluations).<< SEG has no competitors in S.E.Asia (Singapore consortium that took over what was left of Micropolis was the only one.. now defunct). SEG already has about 90% of their drive production in S.E.Asia and China... as do their competitors The last DD company "assimilation" they made was Conners... and we're now seeing the fruits of that! FWIW.. if you now think the hammering will be over by the time SEG officially reports, keep in mind the large amount of employee owned stock (currently blacked-out) that will be able to be traded after earnings are reported.