Western Digital annual hard drive shipments approach 100 million units

Western Digital (WDC) today announced a solid fiscal Q4 (FQ4) 2007 and fiscal year (FY) 2007 result. In the quarter ended June 30, the company shipped 24.9 million hard drives, up from 19.2 million units in the year-ago quarter. Sales climbed from $1.1 billion to $1.4 billion with net profits jumping from $120 million to $233 million, mainly due to a $147 million tax credit.

For the complete fiscal year, WDC reported revenues of $5.5 billion (up from $4.3 billion in 2006) and a net profit of $585 million (up from $395 million). Annual hard drive shipments have increased from 73.3 million units in FY 2006 to 96.5 million in FY 2007.

The revenue growth is mainly attributable to the diversification of the firm’s product base. In FQ4 2006, 66% of WDC’s revenue came from desktop hard drives and 34% from other products such as notebook hard drives, CE hard drives, enterprise hard drives and branded devices such as the MyBook series. In FQ4 2007, that desktop share was reduced to 54%, while 46% of revenues came from other devices. The branded series appears to be especially successful, as revenues more than doubled from FQ4 2006 to FQ4 2007 – from $95 million to $230 million.

The result shows that WDC growth rate is keeping pace with Seagate, which acquired Maxtor last year, and does not lose a lot of ground. Seagate last week said that it has sold 159.2 million hard drives during its fiscal year 2006, with revenues of $11.4 billion and a net profit of $913 million. Seagate sold 39.2 million hard drives in the quarter ended June 30.

The competition between the two companies may get more interesting down the road, as WDC recently announced a $1 billion acquisition of disk maker Komag. WDC has relied on third-party disk makers so far.