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

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (3811)	6/25/1998 12:33:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9256

Mark, "By the way, Tom Porter was in attendance." Tom Porter or Jim Porter? The latter is the publisher of DiskTrend, the former was hired by SEG from WDC last year to be a VP in charge of quality control (if I recall correctly). I have no idea if they are related; perhaps Stitch can say. Let me throw in my thanks for your and GMs summary, depressing as it may be. I have at least one quibble with Geneen's view, though: 2 gig is not enough for many people, even without Win98. Whether we're talking about games or about graphics programs or digital photos (not even touching video yet), 4 gig seems to me to be a minimum, and 6.4 much better. However, that doesn't really touch his overall argument, as they are also in plentiful supply. The scariest, for this sector, statement I have seen lately is Fujitsu saying that they are going to double capacity to 18 million drives a year over the next year. They didn't break that down between desktop and high end, but between that and Samsung still trying to crack in there (an aside: where the devil are these people getting their money from??? the IMF???) as well as Maxtor (lets see how their IPO goes, or if it goes), there has to be a squeeze somewhere. Perhaps this question should be posted on the Asian forum thread, but some of the same people are on both, so I'll ask it here: How can we be getting the news we are reading about the Asian liquidity crisis and yet simultaneously getting a large expansion in a sector which is already overbuilt? And how can the same companies which were prime culprits in overbuilding the DRAM sector be prime builders in this overbuilt, under-margined (if that is a word) sector? Who is lending them money for this expansion? Are their labor/production costs so much lower than SEG, QNTM and WDC that they can actually be making money when ASPs are deteriorating as rapidly as they have been over the past 6-9 months? Isn't there something wrong with this picture?