14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Western Digital has finally come around to releasing its financial results for the recently ended quarter, the first one of Fiscal Year 2011 that is, and it seems that profits managed to slip even in spite of greater HDD sales.
Western Digital is one of the major suppliers of hard drives worldwide, on par with Seagate, the two having occasionally bested each other in terms of market dominance.
The first quarter of fiscal year 2011 ended on October 1, 2010, and was the time when Western Digital shipped 50.7 million hard disk drives.
Profits, on the other hand, slipped to $197 million, or $0.84 per share, which is a fair amount lower than the figures reported during the same period of last year.
Back in Q1 of FY 2010, shipments amounted to 44.1 million, but the net income and earnings per share were of $288 million and $1.25, respectively.
"In a quarter characterized by aggressive industry pricing, we remained solidly profitable, grew revenues and unit shipments year-over-year, and generated $390 million in cash from operations," said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer.
"Our low-cost business model and strong balance sheet enable us to weather the seasonality and cycles of the hard drive industry such as we experienced during the last two quarters,” Coyne added.
"We will continue to focus on quality, reliability, availability and profitable growth to maintain our industry leadership," Coyne went on to saying.
"We remain excited about the significant opportunities being created by the unabated growth in digital content in the home and workplace," he concluded.
All in all, the company's revenues stayed more or less flat during the recently ended 3-month period, at $2.4 billion. What remains to be seen is how things progress and if HDDs in general will lose market share to SSDs.