This article is more than 1 year old

Return of the disk drive bigness? Not for poor old, busted WD

Modest rev rise as profits fall

Western Digital has reported mixed numbers for its latest quarter, with a small revenue rise and a larger profits drop compared with the numbers it reported a year ago.

Seagate reported sparkling numbers yesterday in comparison.

For its first fiscal 2015 quarter, ended 3 October, revenues of $3.9bn were up modestly year-on-year, a three per cent rise, but five per cent higher than the previous quarter

The $423m profit was 15 per cent less than the $495m recorded a year ago but comfortably higher than the previous quarter's $317m.

The chart shows the changes this quarter:

Western_digital_quarterly_revenues

Western Digital produced 64.7 million disk drives, compared with 62.6 million a year ago and 63.1 million in the prior quarter. This wasn't enough, as a chart it supplied showed its share of the market going down:

WD_Vol_and_share_Q1_fy2015

Western Digital disk drive market share by quarter

It was more than Seagate's 59.5 million though.

Another quarter with revenue trends like this and Seagate will overtake Western Digital:

Seagte_vs_Western_Digital_Q1fy2015

Stifel Nicolaus MD Aaron Rakers thinks it's a positive quarter for Western Digital and highlights "the strong increase in average capacity per drive; 1,002GB vs. 875GB in prior quarter (Seagate at 1,007GB). ... The company also reported strong Enterprise SSD revenue at $156m vs $113m and $106m in the prior and year ago quarters."

We charted Western Digital's quarterly enterprise SSD revenues to show the trend:

Western_digital_Enterprise_SSD_revenues_by_quarter

Clearly growth has resumed, thankfully. Small potatoes though, very, compared to disk revenues. ®

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