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

To: Gottfried who wrote (3856)	6/28/1998 6:58:00 PM
From: CPAMarty	Respond to of 9256

thanks GM

To: Gottfried who wrote (3856)	6/28/1998 7:11:00 PM
From: Pierre-X	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9256

Very nice Forbes on HTCH. This caught my attn from Forbes: "Our customers tell us that we reduced plant space required by 40%, reduced labor costs by 30% and improved yields by as much as 15 percentage points." Sounds like a whole bunch of BONUS CAPACITY to me -- if the new wireless suspensions are widely adopted, worldwide HDD manufacturing square footage increase by up to 40%. (!) This caught my attn from Yahoo: "For the 26 weeks ended 3/29/98, revenues fell 20% to $184.1 million. Net loss totalled $25.9 million vs. an income of $27.8 million." Here's an interesting article about Maxtor: sjmercury.com Maxtor increased its market share of drives for desktop PCs from 5.6 percent to 13.4 percent. The share came primarily from Western Digital Corp. (NYSE, WDC) and Quantum Corp. (Nasdaq, QNTM), says Bruce S. Seltzer ... Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq, DELL) and IBM account for 43 percent of all revenues.

To: Gottfried who wrote (3856)	6/29/1998 10:06:00 AM
From: Toko	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Gottfried, Regarding the 1/98 Hutch article, some comments following your posting apply Mr. Fortun's remarks a bit too liberally. The TSA does not reduce the amount of needed HDD manufacturing space by 50%. "Improved yields as much as 15%"- This can relate to HGA, Head Stack, and/or HDD yields; also it's a max relating to somebodies worst case, so don't apply it across the board. "Reduced labor costs 30%"- Reduced at automated hook-up of wires on the HGA side (TSA bonding to the slider) and the Head Stack side (TSA to flex circuit); but he does not say how those savings compare to the higher cost of the TSA. "Reduced plant space 40%"- Definite reductions for Head Stack assembly, particularly on the high end where you previously had 4 wires per MR head times up to 22-24 heads per stack. On the HGA side it doesn't mean too much because there was probably already a lot of mechanization in place, and everyone does this work in off-shore locations. Hutch has definitely taken the lead, and they have shown they know how to make money in the past. This particular technology transition is interesting because it enables the head stack to become an even more critical-to-function portion of the HDD. Regards, TOKO