Seagate just posted its latest fourth quarter financial data and it reported a boost in incomes thanks to a higher revenue and a one-time tax benefit. Seagate is the largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the U.S. and one of the most important in the whole world. Its income increased to $541 million, compared to only $7 million a year earlier, while revenue increased with about 9 percent to $2.47 billion.

Because of a $359 million tax benefit, Seagate saw income rise sharply, which helped pay the $28 million bill for ongoing restructuring and an additional $4 million in several investments. During the last months, Seagate lowered its revenue expectations to $2.4 billion for the current quarter and blamed the end results on the competition, the price war between Intel and AMD and the much lower than expected need for high capacity 3.5 inch ATA and SATA hard disk drives. Even so, for the fiscal year, the U.S. based company earned a 23 per cent jump from the last year's fiscal revenue of $9.2 billion.

"Our results for the year as a whole as well as for this quarter demonstrate the continued strength of the digital storage industry and the positive impact of several important strategic steps we have taken to secure and extend our industry leadership," said Seagate CEO, Bill Watkins in a statement and was cited by TheRegister. Watkins also said that his company looks ahead towards a good revenue this quarter and during an investor conference call he explained that he sees a robust and fast growing demand for higher capacity storage devices and that he is confident that Seagate will be able to capitalize on the opportunity.

During the last year, Seagate completed its merging with the hard disk drives producer Maxtor and despite the buyout, Maxtor remains a separate brand in stores with its own line of products.