WDC

"So, when thinking through the customer concentration issues and the long-term threat of solid-state drives, I would actually think that this company is a high-risk business right now."

"So, right now Western Digital is clearly in phase four, the capital return phase. Now, Stock Screener rated the company's current moat as narrow, given that it's only one of two hard disk drive manufacturers globally that's operating at scale."

"Another risk to think about is solid-state drives. So, these are blazing fast when compared to hard drives, like the ones that Western Digital makes."

"So, in judging this company's management team, I would give it a four out of five with the opportunity to raise that number to five out of five over time as we have more tenure in the corner office for this CEO."

"So, to review, I think this business is fairly exciting right now. It's in the capital return phase. It's moat is narrow and stable. The growth over the next couple years looks very high. The management team has done a fabulous job over the last couple years, but offsetting that is the fact that this business has a fairly risky right now and the valuation is really high right now. But, after analyzing this company, I now know why so many people are excited to own this stock."

"Now, which phase of the business growth cycle is Western Digital in? I think the answer there is clearly that it's in phase four, the capital return cycle."

"So, in rating the company's moat, I'm happy to see that its size is actually narrow, and then its direction is stable."

"So, if you're looking for cheap storage, Western Digital is the way to go."

"Now, in early 2025, Western Digital had a flash memory business, but actually spun that off as SanDisk and now operates basically as a pure play hard drive company."

"But, it is important to note that cloud customers are buying both from Western Digital and Seagate right now, so they don't seem to massively favor one company over the other."

"Make no mistake, on both a trailing and forward basis, this stock is very expensive right now. Now, offsetting that high valuation is the fact that this company has exceeded guidance in the last couple of quarters, and demand for all things AI remain off the charts high. I have a hard time calling this stock anything but expensive right now."

"Western Digital stock has gone absolutely parabolic over the last year and its stock currently has the highest bull to bear ratio on all of Reddit. So, let's do some fundamental analysis on this stock to figure out why bulls are so excited."

"And the uptick in recent years has been especially pronounced. And from a business quality perspective, I like to think about a couple of key questions. Number one is is revenue predictable? And the company's revenue has become far more predictable in recent years thanks to the huge uptick in AI spending."

"Now, a key question to ask is is this pricing power maintainable over the long term? That question remains up in the air, but for now, there's no doubt that this company has pricing on its side."

"So, while it's hard to come up with a truly long-term growth estimate for this business, there's no doubt in my mind that over the next few years at least, this company has very high growth potential."

"the smaller players like Kioxia, SanDisk, Western Digital, Seagate, NA, and Windbond."

"Because in 2011, Western Digital, they lost share when its Thailand fabs completely flooded out."

"They Oh, okay. So the data that we have in there is from the spinout information and it had its own information, but it's already been public for for the year."

"SanDisk was publicly traded. Then Western Digital acquired them in 2016."

"our friend Brandon reminds us that Western Digital isn't hurting very much either. I can look and see how they're done."

"And then boy, do they probably regret this, although maybe there's more to it than that. They Western Digital spun out SanDisk."

"You're looking at high-quality names [181s] like Nvidia, ARM, and WDC."

"Sandisk, Western Digital, things like that have gone up quite a lot."

"I'll focus my attention here on the most famous ones, I guess Sandisk, Western Digital, and Micron because, well, one, Sandisk is up 3,660% over the past year, which means that if a year ago you had put $10,000 in this stock and you didn't sell, right?"

"Memory stocks, [516s] the memory chip related [517s] companies, right? Western Digital, some [519s] of those others."