I think it is inevitable that traditional camera film will suffer the same
fate as the typewriter and vinyl records. Of course, the future is digital
photography.
A leading infrastructure company in this space is
SanDisk Corporation .
The company is the mastermind of Eli Harari, who founded SanDisk in 1988. He is a
pioneer in the non-volatile memory industry, with a variety of patents to
his name. He has a Ph.D. in solid state sciences from Princeton and has been
with such companies as Honeywell, Intel and Hughes Aircraft Microelectronics.
Now, his company is the largest supplier of flash data storage products. In
late 1995, the company went public. Currently, the market cap is $4.8 billion
and there are about 800 employees.
The company has been the developer of key standards for flash memory cards.
For example, the company introduced the first removable flash MultiMediaCard
(its an ultra small size form factor card). In all, the company has more
than 100 U.S. patents.
Okay, so what is flash memory? Well, it stores large amounts of information.
And, the information does not disappear if the device is turned off. Yep, it is perfect
for digital cameras. Actually, it is perfect for other types of multimedia devices,
such as MP3 players, PDAs, and smart phones.
The company has been growing at fever pitch. In the past quarter, sales
were $143.9 million, which was a 174% increase from the same period a year
ago (the sequential growth rate was 32%). About $122.6 million of the
revenues were from product sales and $21.4 from licensing fees. Net income
was $24.3 million. In fact, the company has had profits every year since it
went public.
True, there are risk factors. Competition will intensify. There are also
component shortages.
However, the company has spent huge sums to deal with capacity constraints
and is also continuing to innovate its product line. Besides, the
marketplace is enormous for SanDisk. Keep in mind that the digital camera
market is expected to be 6.5 million units this year and 40 million by 2004.
