Report
Valens Research

WDC - Embedded Expectations Analysis - 2020 03 13

Western Digital Corporation (WDC:USA) currently trades below recent averages relative to UAFRS-based (Uniform) Earnings, with a 14.1x Uniform P/E. At these levels, the market has bearish expectations for the firm, and management may be concerned about their competitive positioning, production, and supply constraints

Specifically, management may be concerned about declines in exabyte shipments, and they may be exaggerating the strength of their competitive positioning within data centers and the quality of their products for hyper scale and OEM customers. Moreover, they may lack confidence in their ability to ramp-up K1 and YMTC production, and they may be downplaying concerns about seasonality and NVMe supply constraints. Finally, management may lack confidence in their ability to meet margin guidance
Underlying
Western Digital Corporation

Western Digital is a developer, manufacturer, and provider of data storage devices and solutions. The company's portfolio of technology and products address the following markets: Client Devices, which consist of hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs) for computing devices, flash-based embedded storage products, and flash-based memory wafers and components; Data Center Devices and Solutions, which consist of enterprise HDDs and enterprise SSDs, data center software and system solutions; and Client Solutions, which consist of HDDs and SSDs embedded into external storage products and removable flash-based products, such as cards, universal serial bus flash drives and wireless drives.

Provider
Valens Research
Valens Research

In 2009, just as the dust was settling from the last major equity and credit market crises, we launched a boutique research firm with the intention of breaking Wall Street’s biases and broken incentives:

  • GAAP and IFRS have failed to provide rules for reliable financial statement reporting
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