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

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (6470)	6/3/1999 6:20:00 PM
From: Stitch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Yogi, I too am pressed for time but I have quit worrying about multi media this and that. The Net (inter, intra, extra)is going to be a business phenomena more and more imo. And as for storage it has a very bright future indeed. Just as a watershed check out the growth of the congressional record over the last two decades. Or the rate at which books are published today versus 20 years ago. Or tax filing growth. Or ...etc etc. Then take a look at the ROW in terms of where they are in automating. Even Japan, as high tech as we think it is, is still largely on the old word processor paradigm. There is huge growth potential IMO and, as usual, we tend to get ahead of ourselves in our thinking. I too see the great appliance centric paradigm but I do not see it sans storage and I am not convinced our brave new world is really here yet in any case. Where it is stored is of little consequence in the long term IMO. (But I note I do love fibre channel).<G> Now, as usual, the question is, can any money be made at it? <G> best, Stitch

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (6470)	6/3/1999 8:08:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9256

QNTM's warning release (see below). Feeds into your negative scenario, Yogi. However, I don't buy it. I have spoken with a number of older (over 70) people over the past 4-9 months who never would have dreamt that they would ever own a computer before this year. They are now into photos, email, games (card and board games, not shoot 'em up games), web surfing of various sorts. Soon they will be into video. Others seem to love the idea of the digital VCR. But that stuff is on the consumer level. On the business level, more and more terabytes are going to be stored as video comes into play. Training videos. Worker manuals. Tech doc showing you what to do, not just writing out instructions. The people making these videos will need huge drives, their backups will be huge. There will be huge databases in many companies. A terabyte will seem like gigabytes do now at some point. But will anyone make money on it? There's the rub. But to give a positive spin on today's news, it may actually be good, for the longer run. Wring out the weak sisters. Let the up and coming wannabes like Samsung know that this business is no easier than DRAMs, and that they should stick to their DRAMS, in which they keep uping the amount they will be investing over the next year (up to over $4 billion from about $1b just a couple of months ago; see the Semi Blood thread). Make WDC sweat, and Maxtor look for an alliance. The cash rich companies like SEG and QNTM should make it. Furthermore, as QNTM's stock gets hit, they will be able to buy more of their stock back at lower prices, which will help earnings going forward. Good thing they warned early in the month. I'm sure their buyback hasn't been completed yet, even though I'm also pretty sure that they bought some stock in the days right after the announcement in the low 20s. They'll get a lot more in the mid teens. ( BW)(CA-QUANTUM)(QNTM) Quantum Revenue and Earnings for First Fiscal Quarter to be Lower Than Anticipated Business Editors/High Tech Writers MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 1999--Quantum Corporation (Nasdaq/NMS:QNTM) today stated that its first quarter earnings are currently expected to be in the range of $.05 to $.15 for the quarter ending June 27, 1999, on sequentially lower revenues. The expected decline in revenue and earnings is attributed to aggressive pricing in the desktop hard disk drive market. According to Michael Brown, Quantum's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, the desktop hard disk drive market is currently experiencing higher than expected price erosion. "As we entered this quarter, we expected desktop units to be relatively flat, with revenue down sequentially due to continued pricing pressures. However, pricing pressures have been more severe than expected, with the sequential rate of price decline roughly double that of the prior two quarters," said Brown. This will result in lower than anticipated revenue and earnings for the company for the June quarter. Commenting on overall demand for the company's disk drives, Brown stated that demand for the company's desktop and high-end products continues to be healthy. "We are enthused about the status of our qualifications for our industry leading Fireball(TM) CX (6.8GB/platter) drives, which we began shipping this quarter," said Brown. "We are also pleased with the customer acceptance of our new high-end hard drives, Atlas(TM) IV and Atlas 10K. With these new products in both the desktop and high-end, we are regaining time to market leadership in the hard drive industry."