Western Digital Corporation (NYSE: WDC) (often abbreviated to WD) is the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturer in the world, ahead of Seagate[2] and has a long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit maker and a storage products company. Western Digital was founded on April 23, 1970 by Alvin B. Phillips, a Motorola employee, as General Digital, initially (and briefly) a manufacturer of MOS test equipment. It rapidly became a speciality semiconductor maker, with start-up capital provided by several individual investors and industrial giant Emerson Electric Company. Around July 1971 it adopted its current name and soon introduced its first product, the WD1402A UART.

Western Digital Corp. is a leading manufacturer of computer hardware equipment, which is then used by the manufacturers of personal computers (PC's) and network systems to produce their own products. Western Digital not only sells hardware to computer manufacturers, but also serves consumer markets directly through its product replacement items and add-on data storage products, which are sold under the Western Digital brand name. In the late 1990s, Western Digital ranked third behind Seagate and Quantum in terms of numbers of drives shipped and market share. Fortune magazine, however, found in 1997 that among its readers, Western Digital was more admired than either Quantum or Seagate in the computer peripherals sector, citing management and investment value as several of the criteria. Over 15,000 people are employed by Western Digital in ten countries, including Singapore and Malaysia. The company is divided into two business units: the Personal Storage Division--responsible for PC memory storage and comprising 90 percent of the company's business--and the Enterprise Storage Group, which makes high-capacity hard drives for servers and workstations.
Western Digital Corporation (WD) designs, develops, manufactures and sells hard drives. The Company sells its products worldwide to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) for use in computer systems, subsystems or consumer electronics (CE) devices, and to distributors, resellers and retailers. Its hard drives are used in desktop computers, notebook computers, and enterprise applications such as servers, workstations, network attached storage, storage area networks and video surveillance equipment. Additionally, its hard drives are used in CE applications, such as digital video recorders (DVRs), and satellite and cable set-top boxes (STBs). It also sells its hard drives as stand-alone storage products by integrating them into finished enclosures, embedding application software and offering the products as WD-branded external storage appliances for personal data backup and portable or expanded storage of digital music, photographs, video and other digital data. In July 2010, Western Digital Corporation acquired the magnetic media sputtering operations of Hoya Corporation and Hoya Magnetics Singapore Pte. Ltd.
The Company’s hard drives include 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factor drives, having capacities ranging from 80 gigabytes to 2 terabytes, nominal rotation speeds up to 10,000 revolutions per minute (RPM), and offer interfaces including enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE), serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) and Serial Attached (Small Computer System Interface) SCSI (SAS). It also embeds its hard drives into WD-branded external storage appliances using interfaces, such as universal serial bus (USB) 2.0, USB 3.0, external SATA, FireWire and Ethernet network connections with capacities of 160 gigabytes up to eight two terabytes. In addition, it offers a family of hard drives utilizing its WD GreenPower Technology. WD also designs, develops, manufactures and sells solid-state drives and media players. It sells its solid-state drives worldwide to OEMs and distributors for use in the embedded systems and client PC markets. It sells its media players worldwide to resellers and retailers under the WD brand.
The Company offers a line of hard drives designed for various markets. It markets its hard drives under brand names including WD Caviar, WD RE, WD VelociRaptor, WD Scorpio, WD Elements, WD AV, WD ShareSpace, WD S25, My Passport, My Book, and My DVR Expander. These hard drives service the desktop personal computer (PC), mobile PC, enterprise, CE and external hard drive markets, and can be found in products including desktop computers, notebook computers, enterprise storage, server, workstations, video surveillance equipment, networking products, DVRs, STBs and external storage appliances. It also offers a line of WD-branded media players under the WD TV brand name, as well as a line of solid-state drives under the SiliconDrive and SiliconEdge brand names.
Desktop Hard Drive Products
The hard drives it designs for the desktop PC market consist of 3.5-inch form factor products with capacities ranging from 80 gigabytes to 2 terabytes. These products utilize either the EIDE or SATA interfaces. The type of EIDE interface used in its hard drives is ATA/100, which signifies a burst data transfer rate of 100 megabytes per second. The SATA interface available in the majority of its hard drives enables burst transfer rates of up to six gigabits per second.
Mobile Hard Drive Products
The Company’s hard drives used in mobile products typically include 2.5-inch form factor products with capacities ranging from 80 gigabytes to 1 terabytes. Its product expansion, including a hard drive spinning at 7,200 RPM and producing ultra-high capacities for specific applications with a three platter platform, has enabled it to provide customers with a full-line of 2.5-inch mobile drives.
Enterprise Hard Drive Products
The Company offers multiple product lines to address enterprise market needs, including the WD S25 drive, which provides up to 300 gigabytes of storage suitable for both mission-critical enterprise server and enterprise storage applications, as well as data centers and large data arrays; the WD VelociRaptor drive, which is a 600 gigabytes, 10,000 RPM, 2.5-inch enterprise-class drive with the SATA interface for enterprise applications; the WD RE family of drives, with capacities ranging from 160 gigabytes to 2 terabytes. The WD RE family serves the SATA market and low-power versions of the WD RE family of drives featuring WD GreenPower Technology. WD S25, WD VelociRaptor and WD RE drives may be used in, but are not limited to, applications, such as databases, e-commerce and super computing in life science, oil and gas and similar industries, business records management, e-mail, file serving, Web serving, near-line storage, medical records, engineering data management, video broadcasting and video security.
Consumer Electronics Products
WD offers a line of hard drives under the WD AV brand that are designed for use in products, such as DVRs, STBs, karaoke systems, multi-function printers and gaming systems. It also offers low-power WD AV drive models that feature the WD GreenPower Technology.
Branded Products
The Company sells a line of WD-branded hard drive-based storage appliances, which are internal drives embedded into PC peripheral-style enclosures that have USB 2.0, USB 3.0, external SATA, FireWire and Ethernet network connections and include software that assists customers with back up, remote access and management of digital content. It sells these storage appliances, as well as related adapters and accessories, through retail store fronts, online stores and distributors. It also sells a line of WD-branded media players, which are devices that enable users to play digital movies, music and photos from any of its WD-branded external hard drives, other USB mass storage devices or the Internet, on a television or home theater system, independent of the PC.
Solid-State Drive Products
WD offers a line of solid-state drives under the SiliconDrive and WD SiliconEdge brands that provide advanced storage technologies for the embedded systems and client PC markets. Its SiliconDrive product family consists of 2.5-inch, Compact Flash (CF) and other small form factors with capacities ranging from 32 megabytes to 120 gigabytes, interfaces that include SATA and parallel advanced technology attachment (PATA)/EIDE/CF and read/write speeds of up to 100/80 megabytes per second.
The Company competes with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Seagate Technology, Toshiba Corporation, EMC Corporation, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, LaCie S.A., Melco Holdings Inc., Intel Corporation, Micron Technology, Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Smart Modular Technologies, Inc., STEC, Inc., Apple Inc., EMC Corporation, LaCie S.A., Roku, Inc. and Seagate Technology.


The disastrous declines in Asian markets near the end of the 1990s hurt U.S. technology revenues in general, and compounded Western Digital's woes. Not only did Western Digital manufacture drives in the East, but it sold ten to fifteen percent of those drives there, before selling the remainder in the United States. The declining values of Asian currency had at least one benefit--however temporary--for Western Digital: "Sales in Asia have fallen, but profits are rising," the New York Times reported in late 1997. "The disk drives are sold in dollars, while the manufacturing costs are incurred in the weakening Asian currencies." It was predicted that inflation would eventually correct this phenomenon, but Western Digital enjoyed it while it lasted.
Western Digital's struggle to keep up, technology-wise, led industry experts to speculate that the company was perfect for purchase in 1998. The Orange County Business Journal quoted David Takata, an analyst with Gruntal & Co., in February 1998: "One of the reasons people are speculating about IBM buying a desktop drive company like Western Digital [is that] IBM would gain manufacturing expertise and Western Digital would gain R&D talent." Takata speculated that Haggarty's previous relationship with IBM might smooth the way for a takeover. As the situation developed, however, market researcher Jim Porter of Disk/Trend Inc., had a different outlook: "My take on the management out there is they would rather do it themselves. I can't imagine Chuck [Haggarty] going back to work for IBM."
Instead of a takeover, IBM and Western Digital entered into an agreement to work together for the very reasons Porter cited. Haggarty told his board of directors that the move was a "major step in changing the game," according to a Western Digital press release. "Last fall we rolled up our sleeves, did a lot of soul searching and seriously examined our business model. We concluded that pursuing a significantly expanded relationship with IBM ... was in the best interests of our company, our employees and shareholders." Haggarty went on to detail the advantages of the agreement, and to emphasize the enthusiasm of company officers in both companies.
Concern had been raised in late 1997 among Western Digital shareholders that the company had misrepresented its assets, and that losses were not taken in a timely fashion. A class action suit was announced against Western Digital on February 2, 1998, alleging that some key insiders had manipulated financial numbers to their benefit, while the average stockholder took a loss. The New York law firm of Stull, Stull & Brody represented what one source called a "handful" of plaintiffs, while Western Digital denied all charges against it.
Western Digital had indeed sustained hard financial blows late in 1997; the company went from debt-free to $513.1 million in debt between December 27, 1997, and March 28, 1998. While Western Digital stock went as high as 54 and split at 44 in 1997, it had yet to regain its original value a year later, going as low as 14 . Funding was tight, and Western Digital raised money the old-fashioned way: they sold $400 million of zero coupon convertible subordinated debentures. The Dow Jones Newswires reported on February 12, 1998, that Western Digital "intends to use the net proceeds of the offering for general corporate purposes." A month before, the company had broken ground on a new manufacturing facility in San Jose, California. Meanwhile in Rochester, Minnesota, the new Enterprise Storage Group's headquarters were in the process of being built. The new research and development facility was planned to include a clean room, administrative and engineering offices, and design laboratories.
Western Digital took special measures to recover its financial equilibrium. In mid-1998, the company entered into a special partnership agreement whereby IBM would share its areal-density giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads with Western Digital, and IBM in turn would have a foothold in the PC peripherals market. It was hoped that this partnership would ensure that Western Digital would be a force to reckon with well into the next century.


OVERALL
Beta: 1.31
Market Cap (Mil.): $8,712.73
Shares Outstanding (Mil.): 232.40
Annual Dividend: --
Yield (%): --
FINANCIALS
WDC Industry Sector
P/E (TTM): 10.57 13.24 27.48
EPS (TTM): -37.51 -- --
ROI: 15.30 15.23 16.09
ROE: 17.09 17.11 17.67


Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1970
Employees: 15,000
Sales: $4.1 billion
Stock Exchanges: New York
Ticker Symbol: WDC
SICs: 3572 Computer Storage Devices; 3672 Printed Circuit Boards

Name Age Since Current Position
Thomas Pardun 67 2007 Chairman of the Board
John Coyne 60 2007 President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Wolfgang Nickl 41 2010 Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President
Timothy Leyden 58 2010 Chief Operating Officer
Michael Ray 2010 Vice President, General Counsel, Secretary
Matthew Massengill 49 2007 Director
Peter Behrendt 71 1994 Director
Arif Shakeel 54 2007 Director
Roger Moore 69 2000 Director
Henry DeNero 64 2000 Director
Kathleen Cote 62 2001 Director
Michael Lambert 63 2002 Director
William Kimsey 68 2003 Director
Len Lauer 53 2010 Director

Address:
8105 Irvine Center Drive
Irvine, California 92618
U.S.A.
 
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