Guys. Be prepared. HDD market slowdown. Inventories at hubs are at a very high level. Seagate announced they missed they quarterly target in drive shipment and revenue.
No it is not market slow down but due to earlier supply disruption issue as quoted by its CEO Steve Luczo. Seagate quarterly revenue up more than 50% from the year ago quarter. Its gross margin was only 1 % lower than expexted. Its share up USD1.01 yesterday.
Bro Usry dun worry, afternoon session with drop more. Just received RM 3500 interim dividend yesterday. Waiting for it to drop more only collect back. Go go go down please !
jcy HA strike prike is 1.22 , i dun think it will go down as that far.. haha jcy RM 4 used to be my wet dream, i think its not likey to happen in near future.
Although JCY is not HDD maker, can we draw similarities between Seagate & JCY in term of business prospect?
"Hard drive manufacturer Seagate Technologies recently announced some bad news. Revenue and gross margin missed projections for the quarter ending in June. I think this is just one of several examples, though, where bad news contains good news for the company. Let's take a look.
Missing revenue and gross margin estimates is certainly bad news. But why were these numbers missed?
Steve Luczo, Seagate's chairman and CEO, provided two reasons. First, he said that the company "reduced shipments in response to the industry’s faster-than-expected recovery from their supply chain disruption." Translation: Seagate overestimated its selling advantage after last year's flooding in Thailand.
Seagate wasn't as badly impacted as chief rival Western Digital during the 2011 floods in Thailand. As a result, the company was able to sell more of its products for a while. That window of opportunity looks to be closed now. This seems to be the ending of unexpected good news for Seagate rather than overtly bad news.
The second reason given by Luczo for the missed numbers was that Seagate "experienced an isolated supplier quality issue" that impacted enterprise product shipments by around 1.5 million units. According to Luczo, the issue has been resolved. In this case, Seagate had temporary bad news that doesn't appear to have long-term implications.
My opinion is that we can miss the target ourselves by reading too much into Seagate's overestimated numbers.
Dinosaur technology
Another piece of bad news for Seagate is that it is primarily a hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturer at a time when many are enthralled with the rise of solid state drives (SSD). SSD technology offers several advantages over HDD, including energy efficiency and speed. The popularity of hand-held devices, like smartphones, has driven much of the growth for SSD technology.
Is Seagate a purveyor of dinosaur products destined for extinction? I don't think so. For one thing, the rapidly increasing need for data storage should continue to be a catalyst for HDD sales. The economics favor HDD for the next few years, at least.
Also, Seagate isn't allowing the changing world to pass it by. The company developed a hybrid solid state drive that provides near-SSD speeds at a significantly lower cost. It also acquired the HDD business unit from Samsung, which Seagate believes will allow it to better compete in the mobile, cloud, and SSD markets.
To call Seagate a dinosaur technology vendor seems off-base. But, then again, plenty of money is made off dinosaur technology. Just ask the oil companies.
Cheap for a reason
Some investors look at Seagate's numbers and think that a stock this cheap must be a value trap -- cheap for a bad reason. Seagate is definitely cheap. Its forward P/E is barely over three, and its price-to-sales ratio is 0.81. Is there a negative reason that Seagate is this inexpensive?
I suspect that the primary reason is the dinosaur technology fears mentioned above. Primary HDD competitor Western Digital also looks inexpensive, with a forward P/E of less than four.
SSD manufacturers aren't as cheap. Fusion-IO trades at a forward P/E multiple of 63. Fusion-IO became the first company to achieve one billion input and output operations per second earlier this year. That's a significant accomplishment.
Sandisk has a less stratospheric forward P/E of 10. LSI trades at a forward P/E multiple of seven. Neither of these companies garners the buzz of Fusion-IO, but they both are still more highly valued than Seagate and Western Digital.
Whether Seagate is a value trap or not depends whether you think there's a future for HDD, and if you think Seagate can adapt to changing technologies. To me, the answers are in Seagate's favor. I see value rather than value trap.
Driving solid
Even with bad news about missed estimates this quarter, Seagate expects to report record revenue and unit shipments. That's good news -- and there's more. Seagate is still sitting on $2 billion of cash and short-term investments after buying back around $1.2 billion in shares. The company pays a dividend with a 3.9% yield.
The best investing bargains are found in stocks that are cheap, yet still have great potential. Seagate belongs in this club, in my view. This is one inexpensive stock that I think will drive solid profits for investors over the long run."
I am definitely not lamken. His analysis is much solid and insightful than wat I cut and paste here. The article was extracted from here http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=STX. Yaa, lamken has been missing for too long.....
I would think is no longer the investment bankers playing around with it, probably the BOD is playing themselvs on this. I'm not sure how it works, but forcing people out from holding the shares means they can collect more and potentially privatising it before the market recovers..just my take, please challenge and let's have a healthy discussion here..
Bomblikeme: I'm not too sure if the IB's had stop playing around with the price recently, but the major shareholder definitely not fighting back, maybe you're right, the people inside are the ones taking advantage of the low prices.
Instead of focusing on short term price movements and manipulations, one really needs to take a hard look at the long term prospect of HDD. HDD will still be in the market for a long long time but the growth will be muted due to the following reasons:
1) Intel is worrying about the diminishing demand for PCs which generally use HDD;
2) The phenomenal growth of tablets and smart phones is there to stay, which use 100% SSD;
3)Cloud computing farms such as Amazon and others are switching from HDD to SSD for data storage because it is more efficient despite higher cost;
4) Price of SSD is falling every month; it will come a day when SSD will pose a serious challenge to HDD
Taking into account of previous 2 qtrs JCY EPS of total > 16 cts and following 2 qtrs let say conservatively 10 cts due to errosion of ASP of HDD and recovery of production from its competitors, with PE ratio of 6-8 times, JCY should worth 1.56-2.08! Moreover the favored USD/RM currency exchange and lower commodities prices will help to enhance its earning.
ymj, petracot, teobl9: I truly believe your studies makes sense, and somehow, is supposed to be what we expect of it. However, you may consider Devil's Advocates but having to see the stock from October last year till now, does good news or good sentiments justify this stock? Speaking of which IBs were hunting the stock down, but I believe the BOD are doing the same..thus my thoughts that JCY may be better than many other Malaysian stock, not being manipulated and transparent is no longer valid. Look at their second quarter performance and their forecasted earnings during their IPO, and we will be able to know that the price now is below what is supposed to be. But why for no reason the stock can keep going down south? Manipulation, that's what I thought..but thank you, appreciate your valuable reply.
Bomblikeme: Thanks for your sharings, but the recent southward movement makes me crazy somehow, although we all know that the real value will definitely more than this. Just hope i can regain some confidence and patience on this counter.
Probably, we'll have to wait till the 3Q12 results out. Another long month to go.
This book is the result of the author's many years of experience and observation throughout his 26 years in the stockbroking industry. It was written for general public to learn to invest based on facts and not on fantasies or hearsay....
teobl9
46 posts
Posted by teobl9 > 2012-07-05 15:02 | Report Abuse
Very quiet today!