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

To: patroller who wrote (7607)	3/23/1998 4:04:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9124

Patroller, "yes I hear that segate and IBM are ramping a storage product as we speak and should be ready to compete any day." Well, the latest info I have on their joint venture tape project was that they planned to have something in late 98. I have no inside information at all, so maybe you're right. But if it happens "any day" now, it would be the first such joint venture that came in ahead of schedule that I know of. Also, IBM is reselling DLT even as they are supposedly working on this joint venture. "bottom line is disk drive makers love to make lots of drives,they don't care if they make money doing it,so I dont think its and asset to make the most of a neg-profit product" This won't last forever. What is happening in drives is NOT the same as what is happening in DRAMs. One hopes, at least, that QNTM's contract with MKE will help them weather this storm a little better than those companies who have fixed factory costs. And I would dispute the contention that the major companies in this industry don't want to make money. Certainly that is not true of SEG, WDC or IBM. And neither Maxtor nor Fujitsu can afford to make drives without making any money; both of these companies need cash, the former for obvious reasons, the latter just had a pretty abysmal report. It does appear to be true that they are executing better than they used to, producing drives that OEMs want unlike the past few years, and the OEMs are taking advantage of this. But some sort of consolidation will come during the next year or so, either "voluntarily" through merger, or involuntarily through bankruptcy. The business of making drives isn't going to disappear anytime soon. QNTM will either be a survivor or a merger partner. In either case, I doubt that they will trade down to book. Sam