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

To: the Druid who wrote (45163)	1/23/1998 8:54:00 PM
From: s. bateh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

Druid: this ass says that once they sell a drive it is hard to sell another to the same person...which hurts growth......if i just bought a monitor i expect it to last a few years......where is his logic....if iom comes out with a better drive people will upgrade...but he makes it sound like we are supposed to buy a new zip every 3 months....he misses the disks end completely!!!!

To: the Druid who wrote (45163)	1/23/1998 9:42:00 PM
From: Zakrosian	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 58324

Quote:"The pace of monthly retail sales growth on a year-to-year basis declined during 1997, from 114.6 percent in January, to 42 percent in June, to -7.6 percent in December, compared with the same months in 1996, This could be very disconcerting. What does the -7.6% figure mean? Are actual sales declining or is the rate of increase declining? Did IOM sell fewer Zip drives in December of this year compared to last year? Or did they sell more but the % change in December 1997 from December of last year was 7.6% lower than the increase of 1996 over 1995?

To: the Druid who wrote (45163)	1/23/1998 10:35:00 PM
From: Brendan2012	Respond to of 58324

>>Quote:"The pace of monthly retail sales growth on a year-to-year basis declined during 1997, from 114.6 percent in January, to 42 percent in June, to -7.6 percent in December, compared with the same months in 1996, according to PC Data, which audits sales from a group of retail accounts representing approximately 30 percent of total retail hardware sales."<< It would have been nice to know this a few days ago! Brendan

To: the Druid who wrote (45163)	1/24/1998 11:57:00 AM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 58324

>>Quote:"The pace of monthly retail sales growth on a year-to-year basis declined during 1997, from 114.6 percent in January, to 42 percent in June, to -7.6 percent in December, compared with the same months in 1996, according to PC Data, which audits sales from a group of retail accounts representing approximately 30 percent of total retail hardware sales."<< Druid, All - These numbers look really bad, until you think about what is really being said here. They are talking about changes in the rate of growth slowing, but they don't specify whether they are referring to dollar volume or unit sales. That makes the numbers a lot harder to interpret. If they are talking about dollar volume, then the declining retail prices, from $199 everywhere in January 96, to the current range of $89 to $149 could account for much of the slowing growth. They are also using retail sales numbers from a set of stores, not drives shipped from Iomega. It should be noted that in January of 96, Zip drives were not as common at retail as they are now, but by the end of 96 they were being carried by many more retail outlets. So that change alone would have added to the retail sales growth rate increase from year to year. My overall point here is that since more Zip drives were sold in the last quarter than in any other quarter before, sales are still growing, even without massive advertising in place. I think chances are very good that the advertising will get things moving faster again. BTW, KE is often given credit for being a great salesman. I don't really see that. I think he could have done a much better job painting the picture of the Q4 results. His statements that if the ad campaign didn't result in increased sales then the expenditures would hit the bottom line was probably necessary, from the standpoint of informing investors about risks. But he could have sold it better. For one thing, he could have issued a press release about it. When SyQuest, a company less than a tenth of Iomega's revenues, announced that they were going to spend 35 million on advertising, their stock actually got a bump. Kim Edwards needn't have said, "Revenues aren't growing enough, so we're going to advertise more." He could have simply said, "Hey, gang, we're gonna blanket the airwaves!" But that's not his style. He's actually very conservative about this stuff, in my opinion, and not much of a hypster at all. - Allen