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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shane forbes who wrote (3067)	4/26/1998 7:58:00 PM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Though this really pertains to chips, chips and fab utilization uderpins the growth in virtually all electronics markets: eb-mag.com Over 90% of those surveyed believe that overall business conditions will either improve or remain the same. That's precisely the way this boy is playing things (market perturbations be darned!!!). Shane.

To: shane forbes who wrote (3067)	4/27/1998 2:15:00 AM
From: Tom Simpson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9256

>A couple of quick comments and then this can be put to rest: Did you say rest? No no nono....none of that for the weary :o) "Desperation" is an appropriate word, especially in Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. Desperation most of all for raw cash flow which is a point you all established a while back. But the broad brush analysis can be misleading. For example, I've not been able to uncover anything which would suggest that Maxtor is not just plain building very good drives at less cost than most of their competitors. They are getting some media out of HMTT in Fremont California, paid for in dollars I imagine. I would have to surmise that a lot of their success is coming from good timing in putting in MR capacity and has nothing whatsoever to do with currency devaluations. We know that WDC by contrast, tried to stretch out thin film and is paying a price. For example, if you go back to spring 97, the story was all about disk drive shortages. Seagate and everyone else was going gangbusters setting shipment records. HTCH was under fire for not having enough capacity. By fall, drives were a glut on the market. The fact is that all of that was largely self-inflicted. The currency gyrations which only got serious around July couldn't possibly have materially altered either the demand in world markets or the actual supply of drives so quickly. The folks that missed the boat were all sales/marketing souls at Seagate, Quantum, WDC, IBM, etc. who were providing Sept sales forecasts in June. These people get paid big bucks to know the future and clearly, taken as a group, they didn't. We didn't either, as we yammered on and on about about the market not showing proper respect for forward PE's. I do think you are correct that the bloom is off the semi's , equipment guys, and disk drives, for a while anyway. Thats what happens when Asia gets capacity indigestion. On the good side, despite appearances, I don't think the demand trend for storage shows any signs of easing up. Heard much about diskless NC's lately? Take care....Tom