WD makes more profit than expected
Profits still way down on last year, though
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Number 2 disk manufacturer Western Digital saw revenues down 25 per cent year-on-year but still made a profit in its third fiscal 2009 quarter (Q3 fy09). This was 82 per cent less than a year ago, but still exceeded Wall Street expectations.
The company had revenues of $1.6bn in Q3 fy09 ($2.11bn in Q3 fy08) and net income of $50m ($0.22/share) compared with $280m ($1.26/share) a year ago. Net income was affected by $14m charges associated with the SiliconSystems acquisition and $4m of restructuring charges. The company shipped 31.6m disk drives, down 8 per cent y-on-y and 11 per cent sequentially. This compares to Seagate shipping 38.4m drives in its first calendar 2009 quarter, which was 10 per cent down y-o-y and 5 per cent down sequentially.
WD's president and CEO, John Coyne, said: "We managed our market segment participation, product mix and costs to optimize our returns in a challenging environment. We have taken a series of actions to resize and restructure the business to remain profitable and cash flow positive at a $1.5 billion quarterly revenue level and the effects of these actions are already showing up in our results."
He noted growing shipments of WD's 2TB hard drive and branded goods. Looking ahead, if WD can sustain quarterly revenues above $1.5bn it will continue to be profitable, which contrasts with Seagate hoping for a return to profitability in 2010. ®
COMMENTS
reason for wd's windfall
the reason, at least in what concerns our company, has more to do with seagate than with wd...
We have totally ditched seagate since the shit hit the fan at the end of 08/start of 09 - the now (in)famous firmware error (followed by the bad firmware update they released) that affects nearly all drives between 500 gb and 1,5 tb manufactured roughly since 2007 until Dec 2008 (as far as i know).....
We were hit ourselves by it: in the space of a couple of weeks at the end of 2008 we lost 6 drives of 1TB each and 4 drives of 500gb each , and since those particular drives contained sensitive information we couldn't even send them back for warranty / external data recovery. We were lucky to have backups, otherwise if we had called a data recovery company to do the data recovery on-site the costs would have been far greater.
The platters for all those drives, after degaussing for security, are now used as wall decorations / mirrors all around our office... pretty damn expensive mirrors for seagate.
So, since the beginning of January, we only purchased WD and Samsung drives and until this week those amount to about 40 drives, on average each being 1TB, and none of them were Seagate drives... it is now a joke among the IT guys here to call those affected drives as made by shitgate,
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