14 DAY TRIAL // Even with all the worry that HDDs are slowly losing share to SSDs, it appears that Western Digital still managed to flourish during the last three months of 2010, leading to better results than originally expected.
Last year, many suppliers of chips migrated to new manufacturing processes, leading to a rapid progress on both the DRAM and NAND Flash markets.
With better semiconductors, solid state drives became more capacious and affordable, while new controller chips gave them new performance levels.
There was also the issue of oversupply of NAND chips, which had a negative effect on spot prices of the chips themselves.
This, in turn, led to the cheapening of storage units powered by such chips, increasing the pressure on the HDD market even more.
Still, HDDs managed to score breakthroughs of their own, not just capacity-wise but also through the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface.
This allowed suppliers of platter-based units to actually perform better, marketing-wise, than originally expected.
Western Digital, for example, sold 52.2 million HDD during the second quarter of Fiscal year 2011 (ended on December 21, 2010).
This figure corresponds to sales of $2.475 billion, a number that is a actually a bit higher than during Q1 and isn't expected to be matched by the Q3 sales (predicted at $2.20-$2.25 billion).
"We are pleased to deliver better-than-expected revenues, profitability and gross margin in the December quarter, reflecting solid execution and an improvement in hard drive industry conditions compared with the prior two quarters," said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer.
"The opportunity for profitable growth in our industry remains tremendous and we are committed to improving our financial performance over the longer term. We plan to do so with a continued emphasis on our industry-leading low-cost structure, high quality, highly reliable and highly available products, and a sharp focus on matching production with true customer demand," he concluded.