So Western Digital (NYSE: WDC) didn't blow the doors off its first-quarter report. Merely good results and another cautious outlook in the vein of what other technology giants are telling us led to a giant yawn. All this not-so-good news appears to have been priced into the stock ahead of time.
Sales came in at $2.4 billion, about 9% above the year-ago quarter, while earnings fell from $1.25 per share to $0.84 per share. Early summer projections of a speedy return to strong PC sales proved overly optimistic, so Western Digital spent the last few weeks of the quarter in an impromptu price war with Seagate Technologies (Nasdaq: STX), Hitachi (NYSE: HIT), and other hard drive vendors to sell off excess inventories across the industry. You should expect Seagate to tell a similar tale when it reports earnings later this week.
But in the long term, data storage of every blazon should remain a fantastic business in which to work and invest. The same trends that drive long-term growth for networking giants Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Juniper Networks (Nasdaq: JNPR) also boost the prospects for storage experts: All those high-definition digital videos, captured pieces of business data, cloud-based services, and so on need to access a server with growing storage demands. In most cases, the slower but cheaper mass storage of traditional disks will continue to carry the day over fast but expensive solid-state drives.
That's one of the reasons why Seagate is currently the target of an official takeover bid, possibly by private equity firms but in my view is a better fit for Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) or Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). Another reason is that Seagate, like Western Digital, is tremendously cheap in light of the growth opportunities that lie ahead.
This report changed none of these facts; Western Digital remains very affordable and looks like a great way to invest in the coming tech revolution.
