What happened
Shares of Seagate Technology (STX +0.00%) have tanked today, down by 10% as of 12:05 p.m. EDT, after the company reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings. The results missed expectations and guidance was underwhelming.
So what
Revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter was $2.52 billion, shy of the $2.62 billion in sales that analysts were expecting. That resulted in adjusted earnings per share of $1.20, missing the consensus estimate of $1.23 per share in adjusted profits. The computing storage tech company blamed the shortfall on the coronavirus pandemic.
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"The June quarter was led by robust cloud and data center demand, which drove record exabyte shipments for our nearline mass capacity drives and strongly contributed to the Company's overall revenue and solid free cash flow generation," CEO Dave Mosley said in a statement. "However, continued economic uncertainty and COVID-19 related disruptions impacted demand in other key end markets including video and image applications, mission critical and consumer markets and also impacted profitability as we incurred higher logistics and labor costs which together weighed on our fourth quarter results."
Now what
Seagate's outlook was also below Wall Street's forecasts. Revenue in the fiscal first quarter is expected to be in the range of $2.1 billion to $2.5 billion, with adjusted earnings per share of $0.70 to $1.00. Analysts are currently modeling for $2.6 billion in revenue and $1.27 per share in adjusted earnings.
"Looking ahead to the September quarter, we expect soft demand from the OEM and enterprise market," CFO Gianluca Romano conceded on the conference call with analysts.
