History 2000: Applied Magnetics Under Chapter XI

US disk head manufacturer Applied Magnetics Corp. has filed for protection under Chapter XI in federal bankruptcy court in Santa Barbara, CA.

Its web site is no longer functioning.

Operations in its Goleta, CA HQ have been discontinued and most employees there laid off. Trading of the company’s stock was halted.

AMC said that it expects to continue limited operations in Malaysia and South Korea in order to fulfill existing customer commitments.

Its last financial results, for the fiscal year ending last October, were disastrous: sales had fallen 79%, from $184 million to $39 million, with a record loss of $236 million (a whopping $155 million already for the last fiscal year).

In addition to considerable delays in the development of GMR heads, AMC suffered from the hard times fallen on the HDD industry, which demands fewer and fewer heads, always at lower prices.

Life is far from easy for disk head makers: Japanese firm Yamaha has decided to leave the market, as has the Korean SEMCO (Samsung Electro Mechanics).

AMC, founded in 1957, was probably the first independent disk head manufacturer in USA.

It acquired rival DAS Devices for $100 million in February 1999.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 144 on January 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.