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

To: shane forbes who wrote (7780)	4/25/1998 2:51:00 PM
From: Tom Simpson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9124

>86,963 in Q3FY1998 ie., 87,000 approx. ] You got it right.....I picked my Seagate numbers up there in the middle of last week and it looks like they put the latest quarter in since. Also notable in those latest numbers is the reduction in barfing potential...200 million out of inventories is substantial progress. I wouldn't think there would be much more than 50-100 million in potential left. It is beginning to look like Seagate is finally getting its operations management act back together. Relative to QNTM it is also notable how much of Seagate's particular pain has been a "highend" problem. Their desktop sales have been pretty stable within a 15% range over the 8 qtr span while the highend got royally gutted. It sort of suggests that with WDC and QNTM we might better think in terms of Maxtor and IBM as the aggressors. Group cap-ex is a little tough to figure because of the overseas players you noted, not to mention IBM. One also kind of needs to break it down into heads, media, assembly/test, and other components. For example, it would make a whole lot of difference looking at Read-rite to know just what part of Seagate's capx fell off the cliff. Its interesting to note that Seagate's component sales have all but disappeared, going from 50 million range down to 7. That has to make it just a bit harder to justify spending capital on things like more media and head capacity at Seagate. It would be my guess that they have pruned capx spending down to what is focused on their highend problem which, if true, would be good long term news for our domestic little guys (and bigger ones like QNTM). Best Regards.....Tom