Northern Region News October 19, 2005 16:43 PM Seagate Allocates Capital Investment To Asia Pacific Operations PENANG, Oct 19 (Bernama) -- Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX), the worldwide leader in the design, manufacturing and marketing of hard disc drives, will enhance its Asia Pacific operations including Malaysia beginning next year. Its executive vice president and chief financial officer, Charles Pope said towards this end, the company had allocated the bulk of US$700 million to US$800 million in capital investment to the Asia Pacific region. However, the distribution of the investment to its four facilities in Asia Pacific -- Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and China -- would be determined by customers demand, he said in a tele-conferencing with Asia Pacific journalists, Wednesday. During the tele-conferencing, Pope also announced the company's fiscal first quarter results, which he regarded as another outstanding and highly profitable quarter. He said Seagate had recorded a revenue of US$2.09 billion, net income of US$272 million and diluted earnings per share of US$0.54 for the first quarter of 2006 as compared to US$1.56 billion, net income of US$54 million and diluted earnings per share of US$0.11 in the year-ago quarter. Pope said, included in these results were expenses of US$16 million for non-cash stock based compensation and US$4 million of restructuring charges. Of the US$16 million in non-cash stock based compensation, US$6 million is reflected in cost of sales and US$10 million in operating expenses, he said. He said Seagate's board of directors had authorised the purchase of up to US$400 million of the company's outstanding shares of common stock. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, Seagate has repaid its existing term loan of US$341 million and is in the process of restructuring its existing revolving line of credit in order to permit the company to repurchase its shares. Meanwhile the company's president and chief executive officer, Bill Watkins said healthy demand across all markets continued with the most robust growth coming from the notebook and consumer electronics (CE) markets. "Seagate's continued growth and industry leadership position reflects the company's strength in all markets for hard disc drive storage," he added. He said the overall industry unit demand grew approximately 20 percent year-over-year while petabyte (data storage capacity equal to 1,024 terabytes) consumption grew 60 percent over the same period. He said clearly, growth continued across all markets and the CE space as consumers were demanding more and more capacity to store, protect and share their digital life. Disc drives continue to be a central, enabling technology for the digital convergence that is driving the electronics industry and as content-rich media continues to move from the home to the hand and to the car, he said, Seagate is expected to gain the benefit as its products become an integral part of these exciting new applications, he said. -- BERNAMA