I love two-horse races in the tech sector. Some, like Advanced Micro Devices taking on Intel have well-defined underdogs and bullies. Intel's decades-long hegemony over central processors is pretty secure, but AMD can put up a heck of a fight from time to time.
Other races are tougher to call, such as Seagate Technology (Nasdaq: STX) taking on Western Digital (NYSE: WDC) for supremacy of the hard disk. Seagate has been the top dog in this rivalry since time immemorial, chased by the eternal runner-up, Western Digital. Had Seagate not slurped up rival Maxtor in a $1.9 billion deal in 2005, Western Digital would have overrun the unit and revenue throne many quarters ago.
As it stands, Seagate concedes defeat on the unit front, although the company still makes more money than the competition. Fourth-quarter sales included 46.8 million drive unit shipments for a total of $2.66 billion in revenues, trickling down the balance sheet to produce $0.76 of GAAP earnings per share. That's up from 40.6 million drives sold, $2.35 billion sales, and a net loss of $0.16 per share a year ago.
Industry research firm iSuppli saw Western Digital surpassing Seagate in terms of unit volume last quarter with 51.8 million, and the second-quarter report won't be here for a while. Seagate CEO Steve Luczo appears somewhat rattled by this development, pointing fingers to "one competitor" flooding the market with cheap drives when the rest of the industry tightened its belts to keep unit prices stable in 2010. That competitor would be Western Digital. Thanks for ruining the pricing strategy of your entire industry, guys.
But Seagate still holds the drive market crown when it comes to dollar sales thanks to a full 70% of sales coming from the price-stable OEM market and the company holding a 65% market share in upscale enterprise-class drives. Western Digital is a mere upstart in those arenas, making a bigger impact on consumer-level markets. Both companies have OEM contracts with Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), but only Seagate also reports gigantic datacenter acronyms IBM (NYSE: IBM) and EMC (NYSE: EMC) among its best customers on its annual report.
It's a tale of two very different market strategies, where Western Digital wants high unit sales even at low, low prices, but Seagate prefers a stricter pricing policy that leads to somewhat lower volumes. Which one is the better stock today? I suppose the tea leaves point to Seagate based on the industrial IT market picking up speed while there are questions about consumer spending.
But that's just my take. Share your own thoughts in the comments below.
