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

To: Henry King who wrote (5290)	7/22/1998 10:44:00 AM
From: Henry King	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7841

Cramer Reads the Tea Leaves at Seagate By James J. Cramer TheStreet.com 7/22/98 7:48 AM ET Who would have thought that Imprimis would one day be a Trojan horse at Seagate? In a previous decade, when Control Data was bleeding from the eyeballs, Larry Perlman, perhaps the single most impressive turnaround artist alive today, sold Al Shugart on buying Control Data's high-end drive business. It was a fabulous match. Seagate got its breakout from the commodity low-end business that had caused profits to ebb and flow with the regularity of the Atlantic, and Control Data got cash, stock and a note that kept it alive while Perlman turned it into a service company called Ceridian. The Control Data reformation -- this company should have disappeared and gone bankrupt if it weren't for Perlman, who is not a showman, so we don't know and revere him as we should -- began the day Shugart bought CDA's storage business. To this day I have never met anyone as impressive, forthright and tough as Perlman, the man who would not let Control Data die. Now it turns out, according to the Journal, that Perlman helped boot Shugart and put in Steve Luczo. Wow. Where I come from this is big news. Shugart just dominated the conference call I was on last week. His thinking has dominated this company for as long as I can remember. Luczo was a deal man, a finance guy, not a drive guy. Something must be afoot here bigger than is let on. Luczo built the new Seagate under Shugart's wing, a company that has more software assets than all of the other drive companies combined. Still, it was Shugart's show and for Perlman to get this involved as a director, there has to be either a: some huge changes coming, or b. some real incompetence that has been hidden from us. Could Perlman be now engineering some broader restructuring of Seagate that would bring out what everyone knows is massive value? Either way, I was very worried about my Seagate position when this news came out. I had hoped to see more positives out of the conference call than I heard. After all, IBM (IBM:NYSE) spoke glowingly about its hard drive division and seems to be making tons. Why didn't Seagate? (Yes I know the pricing environment is awful, but it is awful for IBM, too.) Now that I know Perlman is behind the move, I know what I am going to spend my time doing today. Figuring out how much this company is worth. I did the same for Control Data a decade ago and I got a quadruple. It will be time well spent.