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Technology Stocks : CRUS, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: richard surckla who wrote (5276)	3/11/1998 10:12:00 AM
From: Grand Poobah	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8193

I guess I'm not as worried as everyone else on this thread about Tom Kelly leaving. He did what he specialized in--taking a company that had hit hard times and turning it around financially. However, the strength of Cirrus has always been their good engineers, not their management, and it is the engineering talent and IP that bode well for the future of the company. Mike Hackworth is a good engineer's manager. He is good at thinking strategically and picking out the opportunities in the market where Cirrus has engineering talent to leverage. Whether or not he is the best CEO for a billion-dollar company is another question. That is probably what concerns everyone, fairly enough, but to trash him as worthless is going a bit too far, IMHO. He certainly brings value to the company, and I would agree with Richard that he has been pulling the strings all along, even when Kelly was President. I am long on CRUS because I think it has a good future. They are a dominant player in Mass Storage. They have a lot of patents and IP in the PRML read channel area. They have long relationships with key customers. The Mass Storage business is very cyclical, but I like their position. They are also strong in the communications arena, although they have a lot more competition here and the big payoffs are several years down the road. I wouldn't count on this area, but the potential upside is very high. The Crystal Semiconductor division has established market share in some high-profit industrial markets. I am not as confident in their ability to pull off the integrated video-audio-modem chip and beat the competition with it. But overall, Cirrus has a lot of good engineering talent that will go a long ways toward overcoming any incompetent management.