In the first quarter of 1998, the company reported a loss of $18.6 million, compared with a $23 million profit a year earlier, even though sales were up 13 percent, to $408 million. Whatever Iomega's marketing success, it isn't reaching the bottom line. He does not follow Imation, a spinoff from Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing that is based in Oakdale, Minn., and gets much of its revenue from medical imaging and other products. The company, based in Fremont, Calif., makes a good product, he says, but sells it for too little.
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Many computer makers offer built-in Zip drives as an option but few include it as a standard feature with PC profit margins razor thin, the added cost compared with that of a floppy drive is still too great.īut he is cool to Syquest. As replacements for the ubiquitous floppy, now so cheap as to be essentially free, their impact has so far been minimal. Imation stayed with 3.5-inch floppy disk technology to produce its one-gigabyte Superdisk, and its drives can also read ordinary floppies, a feature much trumpeted in Imation's advertising.Īs replacements for the clumsy tape drives once commonly used for backups, Zip, Jaz and Sparq have succeeded admirably. The drives don't cost much more than Zips but the cartridges can be quite expensive, from $40 for a one-gigabyte Sparq up to $170 for the two-gigabyte Jaz2. Newer products from Iomega and Syquest use I.B.M.'s Winchester hard disk technology and hold much more data - up to one gigabyte for Syquest's Sparq and two gigabytes for Iomega's Jaz products.
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Retailers generally charge $149 for the external Zip model, $99 for the internal the cartridges once fetched $12 apiece but now sell in three-packs for $15. In just three years, Iomega, based in Roy, Utah, has shipped more than 12 million Zip drives, whose pocket-sized removable cartridges hold 100 megabytes of data each, the equivalent of a dozen or so average-size novels or almost 70 times the capacity of a typical floppy disk. The companies' sales are certainly strong. Even colder is the stock of Syquest Technology, the market leader before the days of Zip and the current runner-up. Now its shares are cold, trading for about one-fourth of their 1996 high.
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The Iomega Corporation, whose Zip drives are the most popular, used to be a hot stock - cheered by Wall Street, debated in on-line investment forums like the Motley Fool and favored by managers of growth-oriented mutual funds.
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Consumers are buying the products by the millions, and they may soon be as ubiquitous as the floppy disks they hope to replace.īut the recent past has not been kind to people who bought these companies' shares instead of their wares: Nobody in this business seems to know how to make money at it. The names are catchy, like Zip and Jaz from Iomega, Sparq from Syquest and Superdisk from Imation.
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Witness the makers of removable disk drives.Īnyone whose personal computer has a full hard disk, or who is contemplating the dreaded backup of crucial PC files, cannot help but notice the splashy TV and magazine ads for these companies' products.