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Western Digital Seems Extremely Cheap


Myth465

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/wd-sandisk-team-create-innovative-130000609.html

 

WD® And SanDisk Team Up To Create Innovative Solid State Hybrid Drives

SanDisk Brings Fast Flash Memory Technology to the World's Thinnest 2.5-inch Solid State Hybrid Drives from WD

 

Seagate's hybrid drives are fairly popular and seems to offer good value for money.

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1254762011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_e_1_4_last

 

At only 5mm thick, this product can not only take market share in higher end laptops, but also possibly in tablets.

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folks Jim chanos presentation the sohn conf

 

http://www.marketfolly.com/2013/05/jim-chanos-sohn-conference-presentation.html

 

he is short wdc/stx

 

anyone have the actual presentation

 

would like to see if he present anything that we have not discuss already

 

I was disappointed, by Chanos' remarks because he did not provide meat. I almost have a feeling he was just winding up DE, who owns(ed) both.

The following gives a good sense of what it was about. The meat is in the comments below the short blurp

 

http://seekingalpha.com/currents/post/1014321

 

I'm usually disappointed by Chanos. From what I've read, neither his returns nor his analysis matches up against Einhorn's.

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Barrons highlights an analyst report that responds to Chanos:

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/05/09/stx-wdc-needham-blasts-weak-unclear-chanos-remarks/?mod=BOLBlog

 

The drive industry has never been so disconnected from the PC industry. The firmness in pricing is driven by carefully managed supply and demand dynamics coupled with robust data storage demand that exceeds by 2-3x available data supply [...] Furthermore' data-ipsquote-timestamp=' one of the primary reasons for this increased data demand IS THE CLOUD, where data growth is by some estimates increasing 50-70% per year. Cloud providers consume nothing but the highest capacity drives in huge volumes. These higher priced, higher margin drives also support margins. How in the world he gets to 5-10% gross margins as a target for drives from where there are today is unclear [...']

 

WDC is still my second largest holding . . . I tend to see things the same way as the analyst, not surprisingly.

 

It's fair to say that I didn't hear exactly what Chanos said, but the reports about his presentation did seem like he made some pretty weak arguments (that have been around since at least the beginning of htis thread).  I don't know the details of the management stuff at STX, but I'm pretty comfortable continuing to hold WDC at this point. 

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  • 1 month later...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-24/western-digital-buying-stec-for-about-340-million.html

 

Well this is a head-scratcher for me.  Western Digital plans on buying STEC.  STEC makes mostly enterprise-grade flash drives.  In the enterprise, I see things as moving towards solutions using consumer-level mass market hardware- mass market hard drives and mass market flash drives.  The market for consumer hardware is far greater than the enterprise market (and other specialized markets).  Consumer hardware enjoys economies of scale that would make it difficult for enterprise hardware to compete.  What protects enterprise hard drives is that the enterprise market has specialized needs; the companies making enterprise storage (Netapp, EMC) need to do extra work to get around the problems of consumer hard drives.

 

Google's infrastructure is based on mass market hardware.  Facebook uses FusionIO's drives right now... though things could change in the future.  But I think that the trend is clearly moving towards mass market hard drives in enterprise storage solutions.

 

(EDIT:  Btw, congratulations to those who went long WDC.)

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  • 5 months later...
  • 4 years later...

Used to work at Quantum, which produced disk drives, before they sold everything.

I think it’s a tough business

It used to have some moat, as it’s not easy to master the technology to have the disk head spin at 7200 rounds per second without crashing the head and still load the data efficiently.

Now RAM is getting cheaper and cheaper and the intelligence are moving up to higher layers. And the companies doing the higher layer softwares are also very competitive. The technology change everyday.

 

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  • 3 months later...

Wow 17 pages of discussions on the future state of hard drives and barely a paragraph on their financials which are confusing as fuck. Maybe all of you thought this was obvious but I'm still very confused. Value line has non-recurring losses at 12.53 per/share for 2018 which translates to 3.6 billion. I get the following:

 

Non-recurring = 0.9 (debt charges) + 0.7 (tax) + 2.1 depreciation-0.6 (cap ex)+0.2 (employee termination) = 3.4 billion non-recurring

 

This gives me 4 billion in net income for 2018...I guess I would be comfortable with normalized value of 2 billion if I go by valueline history,

 

All these weird charges really bother me though. I've never seen such a simple business with such a deceptive balance sheet. Why are the taxes so high for 2018. The debt premium makes some sense I guess..they tried to pay off high interest debt and took a hit. The huge depreciation is for tax purposes but somehow they are still paying unusually high taxes..huh?!

 

Depreciation is 2 billion but they only appear to spend about 550 million in cash. Everyone keeps saying this is cheap company. I would appreciate some discussion of the financials.

 

MrB mentioned 3 billion FCF. How does one derive that from the financials?

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