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

To: Mark Madden who wrote (6505)	6/5/1999 4:14:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9256

Mark, <<Does he mean that there were a lot of bid opportunities but he did not get his share because others had lower bids. Or does he mean that he won a lot of bids but he bid so low he can not make a profit. If the latter is true, all the desktop suppliers will be hurting.>> Someone, I think it was Marty van Acker, posted notes from a conversation he had with Maxtor IR a few weeks where they told him that they were walking away from some business because the vendors wanted to pay too little money. [EDIT: Here is Marty's post from the MXTR board: Message 9731968 ] From what I can glean from murmurings here and elsewhere, SEG and Samsung are throwing low end drives away. SEG has shaved costs so much on their U4 apparently that they are beating everyone. Samsung... well, they're Samsung. They have made two announcements in the past few weeks doubling the amount they say they are going to invest in semi equipment next year. It's now over $4 billion. For next year. Will they stay in the drive business when they are number 7 or so, and a distant 7 at that, and they have to make such huge investments in their leading market share semi business which is probably more cutthroat than the drive business? (On the other hand, they may feel like the drive business is one of their high margin businesses, the way DRAMs are going.) Rambling again. I'm kinda pissed about that article in Barrons. I wish they could have saved it for a more propitious time, at least after QNTM had finished buying their $200 million of stock.

To: Mark Madden who wrote (6505)	6/6/1999 9:23:00 AM
From: Z Analyzer	Respond to of 9256

<<I have been monitoring DD prices from a few large distributors in an attempt to recognize falling demand.>> Neither QNTM or any one else is talking about weak demand. It is an issue of excess supply and trying to compete with U-4 on price. QNTM seems less willing to go after low price business than others. Their relationship with MKE may account for this. MKE pricing likely does not adjust downward for sudden changes in industry pricing. The division of the pain is murky. Even though over longer periods, MKE pricing is supposed to be based on world DD pricing ( I believe), it has been quite some time since QNTM made a decent profit in the desktop. Perhaps MKE is still trying to recover from the disasterous heads debacle QNTM got them into. As I recall, your analysis did pick up steep price drops which is impressive. -Z