Western Digital's HDD Shipments Exceed Seagate's

Seagate might have managed to reach the highest revenues during the past quarter, but Western Digital is gradually reducing the gap by selling more and more storage units. In fact, even though it didn't manage to beat its rival in terms of revenue, WD somehow succeeded in selling more HDDs than the top player. This allowed the company to score not just a revenue increase of about $1 billion on-year, but also much higher profits compared with the same period during the previous year.

While is revenues for the same quarter during FY 2009 were of 'only' $1.6 billion, WD, through selling no less than 51.1 million hard drives (compared with 31.6 million in 2009), increased that sum to a solid $2.6 billion. Not only that, but even the net income that Western Digital managed to make showed an 800% on-year jump, from $50 million to $400 million. Finally, the storage-unit supplier made $588 million in cash from operations, which enabled a total cash equivalent of $2.8 billion.

"With market demand stronger than anticipated in the March quarter, our large-scale vertical integration, agile business model and product breadth allowed us to respond to this upside opportunity and again grow our share of the overall hard drive market," John Coyne, WD's president and chief executive officer, said. "We believe that 2010 will continue to be a strong year for digital storage," Coyne added. "We will maintain our focus on facilitating our customers' growth and making them successful while at the same time achieving sustained profitability for WD."

These financial results are those of the third quarter of Fiscal Year 2010, which ended on April 2. As far as the ongoing quarter is concerned, WD expects its sales to keep growing, eventually reaching a figure between $2.475 billion and $2.575 billion.