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March 14, 2006
Video bloggers drive demand for storage
The boom in video blogging or vlogging might not be making the producers of the content a fortune yet. But we think that storage hardware vendors must be pretty happy about the trend.
In Europe, companies like France's LaCie are benefitting.
The LaCie Bigger Extreme sounds ike a hamburger but it is a 1.2TB storage device with highspeed Firewire and a USB port
We don't need market research firms to tell us that, we can just look around. For example, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schultz, who is an avid video blogger and on our Blogroll, posts that he has acquired his second 1.2 TB disk in 3 months.
It is a LaCie box, a brand that is gaining in the small office/home office market, according to the firm's GM, Pierre van der Elst. He noted in the firm’s recent financial results: “We gained market shares in the retail channel, and our business model is taking this fact into account.”
The rise of demand in the retail market for hard drives makes sense with the growing use of digital media in the home. Your a:c euro reporter even has a couple of LaCie's external hard drives. Acquired not because they look good, but because the gear is priced right.
The French company, founded in 1989, is growing quickly and it has good margins for a hardware company. One of its strengths is industrial design. It wins a lot of such awards. We’re not the only ones that think it's interesting, Red Herring has identified it as “small cap computing” stock to watch.
The Skwarim portable hard drive in hot pink with a soft touch cover from LaCie.
Its had 8 quarters of consecutive growth and last year annual sales climbed to €289M, up 27 percent over the previous year. Net income was €23.5 million, representing 8 percent of sales, compared to 6 percent the previous year. Its market cap is currently €419M.
A stackable 80Gbyte portable hard drive that comes in red, white, and blue.
The main reason LaCie is on our radar is that Remote Reward has it in its portfolio. Established in 2000 by a French tech entrepreneur-turned-investor, Andre Jolivet (founded Wavecom), Remote does early stage venture deals, as well as longer term investments in publicly-traded firms, along a theme.
The theme is Jolivet's vision of how convergence is going to roll out. For example, he's big on wireless LAN (WiFi).
Remote says it made a 2000 percent return on its investment in LaCie over the years that it held the stock. It sold a large stake last year, and still has a small stake left. We've been trying to interview Jolivet to hear his thoughts on what's hot and what's not but he doesn't like to see himself in press, we're told.
Read - Remote Reward (website)
Read - The Internet TV Broadcasting Biz Is For Real (alarm:clock)
Posted on March 14, 2006 04:03 AM | Posted to Hardware | Permalink
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