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The numbers are good (good margins, ROE, yield, FCF, no debt) however I'm still unclear about the HDD sector like freedom said. If I were to invest, the only other consolation is that it might be acquired by bigger boys like Brady, who are looking for acquisitions in the Asia region, according to the CEO ( http://www.bradycorp.com/investors/~/med...letter.pdf ). He said, "We will increase our investment in developing economies in South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. We also remain committed to growth through acquisition and continue to explore opportunities in our core space as well as near-in adjacencies." Brady's revenues from Asia contributes to only 26% and the rest is from Europe and US (majority). With a large market cap and cash, they are looking to expand and buy up small businesses. Like dydx said, the co-founder is 62 years old and he has 32+% of the company. Anything clicking here? Reminds me of Thomson Medical Centre and the 60+ year old founder selling his darling to Peter Lim..

that is the best case scenario. may be one of the reasons he is vacating the position

good margin, ROE, yield, FCF are all historical data. When we invest into a company, the most important thing we should look at should be the future. Unless there is huge margin of safety, why would any sensible investor invest into a business he knows that one day it probably will go out of its current main business. A bet on good management to find a good alternative carries great risk. A proper discount should apply.

yes, you can have good margin, ROE, yield, strong balance sheet to weather a crisis, but if the business becomes near obsoletion after a crisis, it could completely destroy a good investment. Often during a crisis, margins would fall greatly, and very often, they never recover to its pre-crisis level after the crisis, especially in a near obsoletion business. Without a good margin, can Adampak have its high ROE? high yield? strong balance sheet, good FCF?

to me, the current price does not offer the margin of safety required to invest into a probable sunset business, especially in technology space. Apple was so popular with its Macintosh, til PC beat it completely. Of course, iPod (iPhone) revived Apple. However, most other technology companies had just become the history.

(02-01-2012, 02:14 PM)freedom Wrote: [ -> ]good margin, ROE, yield, FCF are all historical data. When we invest into a company, the most important thing we should look at should be the future. Unless there is huge margin of safety, why would any sensible investor invest into a business he knows that one day it probably will go out of its current main business. A bet on good management to find a good alternative carries great risk. A proper discount should apply.

yes, you can have good margin, ROE, yield, strong balance sheet to weather a crisis, but if the business becomes near obsoletion after a crisis, it could completely destroy a good investment. Often during a crisis, margins would fall greatly, and very often, they never recover to its pre-crisis level after the crisis, especially in a near obsoletion business. Without a good margin, can Adampak have its high ROE? high yield? strong balance sheet, good FCF?

to me, the current price does not offer the margin of safety required to invest into a probable sunset business, especially in technology space. Apple was so popular with its Macintosh, til PC beat it completely. Of course, iPod (iPhone) revived Apple. However, most other technology companies had just become the history.

So,may I know what is the device to replace HDD?

(02-01-2012, 03:27 PM)yeokiwi Wrote: [ -> ]

(02-01-2012, 02:14 PM)freedom Wrote: [ -> ]good margin, ROE, yield, FCF are all historical data. When we invest into a company, the most important thing we should look at should be the future. Unless there is huge margin of safety, why would any sensible investor invest into a business he knows that one day it probably will go out of its current main business. A bet on good management to find a good alternative carries great risk. A proper discount should apply.

yes, you can have good margin, ROE, yield, strong balance sheet to weather a crisis, but if the business becomes near obsoletion after a crisis, it could completely destroy a good investment. Often during a crisis, margins would fall greatly, and very often, they never recover to its pre-crisis level after the crisis, especially in a near obsoletion business. Without a good margin, can Adampak have its high ROE? high yield? strong balance sheet, good FCF?

to me, the current price does not offer the margin of safety required to invest into a probable sunset business, especially in technology space. Apple was so popular with its Macintosh, til PC beat it completely. Of course, iPod (iPhone) revived Apple. However, most other technology companies had just become the history.

So,may I know what is the device to replace HDD?

I don't need to know exactly what is going to replace HDD, be it SSD or whatever new technology, as long as there is something showing strong trend of replacing HDD. and clearly, SSD is already taking a huge market of HDD in consumer electronics. I would say SSD is a front-runner with desktop PC sale dropping and that more laptop are using SSD instead of HDD.

if enterprise market is the only place left for hard disk drive, there would not be any future for HDD. just look at current tape market.

when HD was fighting against Bluray, no one knew who would win. later when more switched to bluray, everyone knows that HD lost.

I don't think most people really cares about who really kicked Nokia's ass in mobile phone market, be it IPhone, Android or Windows Phone. We know Nokia lost already.

(02-01-2012, 03:40 PM)freedom Wrote: [ -> ]

(02-01-2012, 03:27 PM)yeokiwi Wrote: [ -> ]

(02-01-2012, 02:14 PM)freedom Wrote: [ -> ]good margin, ROE, yield, FCF are all historical data. When we invest into a company, the most important thing we should look at should be the future. Unless there is huge margin of safety, why would any sensible investor invest into a business he knows that one day it probably will go out of its current main business. A bet on good management to find a good alternative carries great risk. A proper discount should apply.

yes, you can have good margin, ROE, yield, strong balance sheet to weather a crisis, but if the business becomes near obsoletion after a crisis, it could completely destroy a good investment. Often during a crisis, margins would fall greatly, and very often, they never recover to its pre-crisis level after the crisis, especially in a near obsoletion business. Without a good margin, can Adampak have its high ROE? high yield? strong balance sheet, good FCF?

to me, the current price does not offer the margin of safety required to invest into a probable sunset business, especially in technology space. Apple was so popular with its Macintosh, til PC beat it completely. Of course, iPod (iPhone) revived Apple. However, most other technology companies had just become the history.

So,may I know what is the device to replace HDD?

I don't need to know exactly what is going to replace HDD, be it SSD or whatever new technology, as long as there is something showing strong trend of replacing HDD. and clearly, SSD is already taking a huge market of HDD in consumer electronics. I would say SSD is a front-runner with desktop PC sale dropping and that more laptop are using SSD instead of HDD.

if enterprise market is the only place left for hard disk drive, there would not be any future for HDD. just look at current tape market.

when HD was fighting against Bluray, no one knew who would win. later when more switched to bluray, everyone knows that HD lost.

I don't think most people really cares about who really kicked Nokia's ass in mobile phone market, be it IPhone, Android or Windows Phone. We know Nokia lost already.

There are positive examples of advanced technology kicking the asses of old technology.
Floppy vs USB drives
VCD, DVD vs VHS

However, there are also promising technology that fails to outdo old technology even after decades of research
Fuel cells, Solar panels vs fossil fuels
Electric car vs petrol car
Supersonic flights vs subsonic
or even better, paperless office!(Did HP panic?)

The analysis of an ultimate demise of a technology due to another upcoming technology requires the understanding of the physics of both technology.
The mere impressions of a SSD flooded market does not mean that HDD market is shrinking. In fact, thanks to SSD, the HDD market is growing.

Can nand flash technology SSD replace HDD? NO...NO.. NO.. unfortunately, the physics behind it means that it has reached almost its limit.
Are there newer solid state technologies available? Yes. But unfortunately, there isn't even a consumer prototype. not to mention production plant for it.

Well, a propaganda article from seagate but there are some truths in it.
http://allthingsd.com/20111005/it’s-all-...rd-drives/

By the way, my little post here will unfortunately consume some HDD spaces in my notebook,your notebook if you are using notebook, starhub proxy server, host server for valuebuddies, backup server for valuebuddies, cyclone backup HDD, google search engine, yahoo search engine, bing search engine and many proxy servers around the globe.

It is more a win-win scenario than anything else.

Quote:The analysis of an ultimate demise of a technology due to another upcoming technology requires the understanding of the physics of both technology.
The mere impressions of a SSD flooded market does not mean that HDD market is shrinking. In fact, thanks to SSD, the HDD market is growing.

I would have the example of Plasma Vs LCD as my defense. The limitation did not stop LCD from beating Plasma. Given enough research and investment on SSD, I am quite positive on SSD's prospects. I doubt, companies will invest comparative amount on HDD. And the same goes to solar power. Given current lowered cost solar equipment, actually, solar energy is quite a promising clean energy.

also, from the article you used, it is easy to tell that retail desktop/mobile PC contributes much more HDD sales than enterprise market. people who are betting that cloud or enterprise is going to drive HDD sales will be disappointed. last time, I checked, retail PC sales were bad. to add more salt to the wound, laptop already starts to shift to SSD. desktop? I am not sure how many consumers still own a desktop. I, for one, have not been using desktop for at least 7 years. My company also uses much more laptops than desktops.

With virtualization is increasingly popular, storage demand drops rather than rises. just like the old times, every body did not need a full-function PC, you could just own a workstation. storage were shared. it will increase the utilization rate of storage, thus reduce the demand of storage, since fewer copies of the same data are required. Also, virtualization reduces the storage requirement of each device. So why would every device require a 1TB storage if cloud or whatever shared content mechanism is going to be used. Most devices just require 50Gb to install OS and connection to cloud storage.

actually its not virtualization that is the bane. virtuallization doesnt do as much as the cloud movement.

LTE is the greater enabler. it allows streaming media. the last frontier.

(02-01-2012, 05:48 PM)freedom Wrote: [ -> ][With virtualization is increasingly popular, storage demand drops rather than rises. just like the old times, every body did not need a full-function PC, you could just own a workstation. storage were shared. it will increase the utilization rate of storage, thus reduce the demand of storage, since fewer copies of the same data are required. Also, virtualization reduces the storage requirement of each device. So why would every device require a 1TB storage if cloud or whatever shared content mechanism is going to be used. Most devices just require 50Gb to install OS and connection to cloud storage.

Personally, I think the trend is towards SSD powered devices eg. Apple AirBook and perhaps the Google NB. Think slim, light-weight.

BUT, I still need my minimum 1TB of HDD backup storage mainly for my Photos and Videos (what to do, have kids and need to record all those memorable moments + holidays). In fact, I know of quite a few acquaintances who are doing their own home RAID array type of storage + backup ie. they need several TB worth of HDD storage. I was told the HDDs need to be replaced every 2-3 years, to be safe (to protect data integrity/corruption).

As for Cloud, the main problem I have is that I'll need an internet connection to access my data. That's ok if I'm at home but can become troublesome, especially if I'm overseas. There's also a fear of data security/integrity that's going to be hard to overcome. I think I'll still stick to my 1-8TB backup system for the time being.

Not vested.

(02-01-2012, 11:15 PM)Drizzt Wrote: [ -> ]actually its not virtualization that is the bane. virtuallization doesnt do as much as the cloud movement.

LTE is the greater enabler. it allows streaming media. the last frontier.

virtualization enable retail/office computing devices not to require huge storage any more, which will reduce demand of HDD, making SSD a viable storage for all retail/office computing devices