Western Digital sees exceeding high end of EPS guidance range this quarter

David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital, said while presenting at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference: “Let’s talk about the current business environment. I think we came into the quarter. If you go back to last quarter, we are very happy with the way the business performed. We clearly saw both businesses turning. I think if you look at each business on the NAND business, what we’ve been trying to do is really put together a best-in-class cost position on our fundamental NAND road map… I think through the downturn, we’ve delivered best-in-class gross margin in our NAND business by a significant amount, quite frankly. And I think it’s really the combination of those 2 things where we’re the best core technology, given the scale we have in R&D with Keohane tied to the best portfolio. And then in the HDD business, of course, we saw the big hyperscale players in the U.S. coming back more robust conversations there. We saw good growth in China. We had over 100% sequential growth in China in the HDD business. So we came into the quarter with a lot of strength and a lot of momentum in the business, which brings us to the current quarter. I’ll give a little bit of an update on what the environment looks like right now. I think from when we guided, the business is stronger than that at this point. If we look at the guidance ranges we provided, we expect to be near the high end of guidance of the range we provided. But each business is performing better from a profitability point of view. Couple of points of additional gross margin in each business. All the rest of the numbers are within guidance ranges. So we expect this quarter, we expect on an EPS basis to exceed the high end of our guidance range.”