Western Digital Shares Jump After Beating Earnings Expectations

Non-GAAP profits were 69 cents a share, above the company’s guidance range of 40 to 60 cents, and ahead of the Street consensus at 54 cents. GAAP, or generally accepted accounting principles, profits were 20 cents a share, compared with a loss of 47 cents a share a year ago.

For the March quarter, the disk drive and flash memory storage company sees revenues of between $3.85 billion and $4.05 billion, with non-GAAP profits of 55 to 75 cents a share. The previous Street consensus called for $3.88 billion and 64 cents a share.

Western Digital operates in three segments, and they had wildly divergent results.

In client devices, where the company supplies solid-state drives for notebooks, tablets, and other devices, sales were up 19%, to $2.1 billion, as the pandemic drove demand for computing hardware. 

Western’s data center devices segment, on the other hand, suffered a 46% sales decline, to $807 million. The company said that cloud computing customers had been in a digestion period and asserted that demand in the segment likely bottomed in the quarter and should rebound in the March quarter.

Western said sales in the client solutions business, which sells storage devices through retail, saw a 6% rise in sales, to $1 billion, a two-year high. 

“During the quarter, we captured strength in the retail business and also delivered on our target outcome to complete qualification of our energy-assisted hard drives and second-generation enterprise SSD products with some of the world’s largest data center operators,” CEO David Goeckeler said in a statement. “While there is still more work to be done, we remain extremely focused on meeting the needs of our customers and ramping our next-generation products throughout calendar 2021.”

In late trading, Western Digital is up 5.2%, to $55.40.

Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]