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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: voop who wrote (695)	3/6/1999 9:30:00 PM
From: Bahama	Respond to of 54805

Hello Voop, welcome! BRCM's days are definitely NOT numbered at the moment. We'd have to see some serious market share shifts away from BRCM. Although BRCM has a fairly diversified product line for such a small company, they're being attacked on all fronts (but attacks and conquests are two different things). They've had it pretty easy so far, but they've also established some good business relationships. We're about to see what BRCM is really made of. How will they respond to competitive threats and price wars in the commodity lines? Only time will tell. I'd suspect we're a year or more away from being able to make any kind of informed decision about competitive threats. The key thing to watch for in the mean time is self-destruction, especially in the way of high employee turnover in key positions, and missing promised product deadlines. Unfortunately, that's not something you can find at quote.yahoo.com. You either have to work in a directly related business, be a customer with close ties to insiders, or know the right people (sales reps that frequently visit the company are THE BEST source to get a pulse on the company's turnover).

To: voop who wrote (695)	3/7/1999 1:20:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Voop, Having read Bahama's response to your post,I'd like to add that BRCM's days may not be numbered, but it's also highly unlikely that they will become a gorilla. Anything's possible, especially if they can get a tornado going in a niche market which places them as a gorilla on top of a hill instead of a mountain, but displacing Intel is unimaginable. Even so, a lot of us like to use the authors' ideas to identify the strengths and weaknesses of players with the understanding that it's not just gorillas and potential gorillas that can make great investments. I agree with your comment about contract manufacturers, that they operate in a commodity environment and as a result can never be gorillas. Add Chaz's thoughts about them too. On that note, a good friend suggests that the biggest threat to EMC becoming a gorilla is that storage, even their high-end storage, could become commoditized. Hmmmm. --Mike Buckley