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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (5456)	4/15/1999 5:58:00 PM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Art, Having $125 million on the books and being able to own some of your own company for 75 cents on the dollar can't be all that bad. O.K., so your liquidity may suffer temporarily. I guess it isn't common practice to acquire shares in your own company during a downpour? You have to be a mature, solid, cash rich blue chip before you can dabble a bit in the market and play your own stock? I feel the contingencies were not in place in a timely fashion and they balked when the opportunity arose. According to the Fall conference call the BOD directors had discussed a share buyback several times. I think Cindy said, "that issue has come up the last few times we have met" or something like that. By the way, that $125 million is still on the books and they had already coughed up a bunch of cash for the foundry in Taiwan. There were no other outlined expenditures. It was being saved for a rainy day... ...AND IT RAINED! Ausdauer

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (5456)	4/16/1999 8:33:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Don and Art, I will not argue with either of you about the merits of a buy back because I am way out of my element here. Having said that, is it unusual for a company to buy and sell its own stock for various reasons. For example, in preparation of fending off unwanted suitors. How about for the sake of stabilizing the share price during a flurry of unjustified selling? I mean, who knows better about the relative value of the company other than the B.O.D. I can assume than that these are not common practices and companies don't participate in the open market during such punishing periods of market volatility. For that matter, they don't write options on their own stock either? I remember reading an IBD article 4 or 5 months ago which detailed the fate of repurchased shares. Eliminating the shares was one option, but that practice is less common than one imagines. Now we are faced with printing new shares and diluting the value of the stock. Meanwhile the money raised in the secondary offering has been sitting around for almost a year and a half and no capital investments have been made. Perhaps a share repurchase would have been useful now in avoiding the need to print new certificates or to bolster the shares made available to non-officer employees in the option purchasing plan available to them. Don. Art. Just go ahead and say that a stock repurchase last fall was an extremely unwise consideration and would have reflected poor business judgement. Ausdauer