STOCKWATCH: Industry gets chance to show off
STOCKWATCH: Industry gets chance to show off
It was a week of peak industry events for storage vendors to showcase their wares, and the goodwill drove stocks higher on hopes for future technologies.
The Comdex Fall 2002 show in Las Vegas was well populated with storage vendors, and Australia had its own Storage World show, with both events enabling developers to focus on new technologies and standards. FCIP, iSCSI, CIM and WBEM were some of the acronyms thrown across the show floors to spice up vendor presentations on promising new product lines.
One of the biggest news items to come out of the shows was the movement in what is a fairly unassuming component of storage hardware: the host bus adapter. With few vendors jumping on the iSCSI bandwagon so soon after the protocol had been ratified, it was left to the manufacturers of equipment for the vendors to push the standard.
LSI Logic was the biggest mover overnight, being the only company to record double-digit growth: in this case 10.3 per cent, rising by 63 cents to US$6.74. It was one of two manufacturers of host bus adapters to announce iSCSI-compliant products during Comdex. The other, QLogic, rose 5.5 per cent over night by US$2.17 to US$41.43, capping a recovery from a 52-week low six weeks ago of US$19.66. The leading vendor of host bus adapters, Emulex, rose 8.6 per cent by US$1.73 to US$21.86. This was also a recovery from a similar slump that had its price below US$8 in October.
Many other storage stocks scored gains of between four and nine per cent overnight, including Adaptec, StorageTek, Veritas Software, Network Appliance, Quantum, Legato, EMC, Maxtor and McData. Analyst firm Salomon Smith Barney upgraded Maxtor's stock from Underperform to In-line before the start of yesterday's trading. The firm put a target of US$5 on the stock, which it promptly approached by rising 21 cents to US$4.98 on the day.
The only one to lose out significantly on the day was Bakbone Software, continuing its choppy performance of late. It lost eight cents to close at US$0.91, having hit a 52-week low of 86 cents last Friday. The company's Q3 results, released on November 5, showed a loss of US$2 million on sales of US$4 million.
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