An inveterate disk-drive manufacturer, US millionaire Finis Conner has chosen Dublin as the headquarters for his third venture into the business.

Conner Technology is aiming to target the sub-$1,000 (€927) personal computer market, and is seeking to take advantage of this State's 10 per cent corporation tax rate and its proximity to European markets.

"We believe we can see a new trend in the marketplace that other businesses, not just disk-drive, businesses, would be well advised to follow," Mr Conner says.

He has been described as a serial entrepreneur by Business Week magazine after he co-founded Seagate Technology in 1979, sold out his stake for $15 million in 1985, founded Conner Peripherals in 1986 and sold it to Seagate in 1996 for $1 billion following a loss-making period.

A native of Alabama, Mr Conner is the youngest of five children whose father was a carpenter. He has described how he "barely got out of high school", but through the encouragement of a brother, moved to California at the age of 19. He eventually became an electronics salesman after doing an industrial engineering degree and worked for Al Shugart of Shugart Associates. The two of them later set up Seagate Technology.

Now Mr Conner has embarked on a new venture into the disk-drive market with a formula and $20 million in seed capital which he believes will allow Conner Technology to shoulder its way in the face of cut-throat competition.

"We do not see that we are going to injure any of our competitors. We think we are offering another choice to the customers to have another high quality, low-cost supplier."

He is marketing the equivalent of the old Volkswagen Beetle in disk drives - a reliable, durable but low-end storer of computer data - and has outsourced the manufacturing operations to Great Wall Technology, a Chinese company. His customers will be low-cost personal computer manufacturers.

"We believe that the market that is most rapidly growing and represents the wave of the future is the sub-$1,000 PC market," he says.

The business model he has developed - sub-contracting the manufacturing, setting up a development section in Colorado and establishing the corporate headquarters in Dublin - is aimed at producing two low-cost, disk drives, a 4.3 gigabyte model and an 8.6 gigabyte model for about 20 major computer manufacturers.

"We believe that with two disks, we can probably deal with up to 80 per cent of the needs of our desktop customers.

"Our product selections are small, our customer selection is small in number and we can achieve a much lower cost in operating expenses than our competitors."

Along with its low corporation tax regime, Dublin is ideal as a sales and support centre for Europe, he says. The numbers employed will be relatively low.

The Chinese facility was chosen carefully to cut down on logistics costs. It is close to the sub-suppliers of the disk-drive components and also to PC manufacturing operations and Mr Conner believes operating expenses will be up to half of those of his competitors.

"Most of our competitors have very large facilities around the world with tens of thousands of employees to do the manufacturing and final assembly of these drives," Mr Conner says.

He has raised more than $20 million in a private round of financing, and a further round of financing for working capital needs is expected to be carried out in late summer.

"There is nothing wrong with being a private company making a lot of profits," he says, although he may take the company public after a few years.

Seagate has had a troubled history in recent years, and the effect of an industry downturn was felt in the Republic with the closure of its plant in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, in December 1997, with the loss of 1,500 jobs, and the indefinite postponement of a new factory in Cork.

Mr Conner says unit demand for disk drives is growing and he believes the shift is towards a low-priced product. Seagate's problems, which occurred in 1997, were due to a slump in industry demand for higher end drives.

It is still the industry's largest disk-drive producer, with a $6.8 billion turnover. "They [Seagate] have 85,000 employees. We have 85," is how Mr Conner puts it.

As well as value for money, he says PC users are looking for a higher level of reliability than some corporate users, expecting to have the same functionality from their computers as they get from their televisions. "My belief is the Internet is the driving force for the need for much lower-priced computers," he says.

Why at 57, he persists in a high-risk industry when he evidently has his money made is a question asked when he set up his last company, Conner Peripherals, and Seagate Technology.

The answer, he says, is the "fun" he and the senior managers hope to have and the difference they will make. "I believe I can assemble a team of experienced managers and bring an entirely different solution to the market. . . And, at the end of the day, that is the fun part of this industry, to be able to do something differently and bring real value."

He recalls that he was called Finis because his mother intended that he would be the last child she would bear. His name is derived from the French word, fin, meaning end. But for Mr Conner, it seems the disk-drive business is a never-ending story.