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

To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (13279)	6/29/1998 10:49:00 AM
From: Mang Cheng	Respond to of 25814

Jock, I agree that's a good buy and the Street seems to agree. Paying 1.23 price/sales for a return of 9% is not bad. S. Korea needs to sell all their assets to pay for their DRAM mess. That's the problems with central-planning economies - they put all their subsidies into DRAM, autos, consumer electronics and they all went bust. Mang

To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (13279)	6/29/1998 10:59:00 AM
From: Pravin Kamdar	Respond to of 25814

Jock, Symbios has a new 8" fab in Colorado Springs. It's part of Symbios; not Hyundai. Pravin.

To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (13279)	6/29/1998 11:28:00 AM
From: E. Graphs	Respond to of 25814

Jock & All, Here's their site: symbios.com E

To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (13279)	6/29/1998 11:44:00 AM
From: Grand Poobah	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

This seems to be a very good purchase to me for at least two reasons. One, it seems to be a great buy financially. Two, it really augments LSI's capabilities in the disk drive area. I have always felt they were so weak in that area as to not be a viable competitor on a large scale, but this certainly changes that. However...it would seem to me that they are now going to be a competitor of Adapatec's in SCSI, which will not be easy. I haven't followed that market very closely for a while. However, another of my investments, CRUS, tried to compete with Adaptec in SCSI controllers a few years back and got their butt kicked. CRUS of course is the market leader in IDE controllers, so they are no small fry in the disk drive world. Looks like Symbios is in a similar position to LSI as far as manufacturing capability, maybe just slightly behind, since their 0.25-micron fab is ramping up to volume in early 1999 while Gresham is ramping up this fall. I don't know much at all about their reputation in the industry as far as manufacturing goes. Here's the excerpt from their website regarding the fab: FORT COLLINS, COLO., April 20, 1998--An industry leader in delivering innovative cell-based technologies to the electronics industry, Symbios, Inc. today announced the availability of its next generation SYM10TM 0.25æ six-layer metal CMOS ASIC technology. The SYM10 technology, which is available now to customers wishing to start new designs, will be manufactured at the Symbios 8-inch wafer fabrication facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Volume production can be expected in early 1999. G.P.

To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (13279)	6/29/1998 5:37:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

Jock, about the product mix, or "fit" between LSI and Symbios, well, first, LSI has no worries re the FTC as happened with Adaptec. No possible monopoly here. I have another brief comment about product mix, or synergy at the end of this post. However, I have a whole lot more to say about Symbios and their markets so far. Also, some responses to K the Investor's #13284. First, my experience with Symbios. They are an excellent company, and an excellent vendor to their OEM customers. That, to me, is numero uno, to be a company that supplies quality, state of the art products that meet customer requirements, on time. Keep the customer satisfied. They do that. This is a whole lot more important than "how's the fit." There are a lot of companies that fit better with LSI, but I would run screaming to the sell line if anything got started with them. Getting back to Symbios, they remind me a little of EMC a few years ago. RAID DASD has been a tremendous concept for large scale storage right from the start, and Symbios is right in the middle of it, from their controller through the RAID array. Turnkey medium to large scale mass storage, up to around a half Terabyte in a box. Excellent company, hot product. Looks OK to me so far. Responding also to the post from K The Investor, his comments italicized: I think I read somewhere that symbios specializes in unix based systems... Not true. Symbios RAID products perform just fine with NT, as well as with UNIX. The Symbios RAID products I have experience with are in top of the line NT servers, and they work great. BTW, it doesn't matter, UNIX will be around for a long time. Sun and Fujitsu have announced support for Solaris, Sun's very robust and scalable version of UNIX, on Merced, Intel's 64 bit chip of the future. UNIX, or NT, both will do well. I can go into the pros and cons of UNIX and NT if anyone wants, but it's a moot point here because Symbios supports both. A couple of other minuses K saw about Symbios: Second, the DD and high end computing segments are not very pretty right now and the rate of growth is certainly questionable. Au Contraire. The big funk about the drive sector has been in the PC market, not in the workstation, server or mainframe markets. Look at EMC and STK charts: techstocks.com techstocks.com Symbios is in the same markets as EMC and STK, not Seagate, Quantum or WDC. As far as high end computing, it will be exploding with Intel's new Xeon server chips now, and with Merced to turn on the after burners starting in two years. These on top of existing Sun, HP, IBM and many more workstation and server sales. Hey, you're talking about Internet servers. Requirement for these goes up with the Internet. It appears that LSI is going to try and remain a stand alone company for the next five years which is disappointing because all the good dance partners will have been chosen by then and LSI will be forced to partner up with some ugly middle to low tier players in an attempt to stay on the dance floor. LSI just partnered up with the one of the best up and coming companies in the computer related field, at an almost firesale (foreclosure?) price because a company in Asia had to do it. I like it. As for product fit, or mix, I would imagine that LSI would work with Symbios in optimizing their existing SCSI, or RAID controller chips re speed and cost, and work together in coming up with other I/O controller chips to fill out Symbios' product line. The RAID part of Symbios, I would imagine LSI would leave it to Symbios. Tony