03-02-2004, 08:30 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Sandisk: The Kodak of the Digital Age?
"Move over Kodak, it's a SanDisk moment. Riding the wave in digital photography, SanDisk, the low-profile Sunnyvale maker of memory cards, wants to become a household name for shutterbugs.
The momentum is on the Silicon Valley firm's side. Sales of digital cameras, which use memory cards to store images, surpassed those of 35mm cameras for the first time in the United States last year. The market grew so fast that it not only outpaced one industry research firm's 2003 forecast, but also its estimate for this year. That's all good news for SanDisk, the largest supplier of memory cards, which some have dubbed the 'digital Kodak'."
With 16.4 million digital cameras shipping world-wide last year, the industry is growing faster than most people predicted it would, and Sandisk is in a strong position to be there waiting when consumers want to buy bigger memory cards. The article goes on to explain the "Shoot and Store" concept:
"SanDisk is now making a push to reach consumers who are not tech savvy, selling a $14.99 compact flash card, called Shoot & Store, that can hold as many as 50 images. The card is designed for people who either don't own a PC or don't want to bother downloading photos from the memory cards to their computers. Instead, the idea is to keep the cards as digital negatives."
Now that I've learned a little more about Sandisk's approach, I see some merit in it. I can see a soccer mom getting a digital camera, a few memory cards, and a stand-alone 4x6 printer or taking her cards into Wallmart for printing. And at $15 a pop, it would be easy enough to keep a few cards lying around, or even one card for each event. Sure, that approach is fraught with issues of data integrity (no backups! 8O), but Jane soccer mom doesn't think about things like that. Sandisk is on to something here, and they're in a good position to be "the" memory card brand - they're already everywhere I look in retail. Will Sandisk succeed? I'm betting they will.
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