Comparing Revenue and Key Metrics For The Two Portable Memory Heavyweights, Seagate And Western Digital

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Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) and Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) are two of the leading electronic data storage providers worldwide, manufacturing storage devices for both personal use and enterprise applications. The memory device market has seen continuous innovation over the last few years, leading to an increase in average storage space and a decrease in cost per bit. Of late the supply glut in the memory market has led to a drop in DRAM and NAND prices, and has hurt memory providers.

In this dashboard, Seagate vs Western Digital: How Have Revenues For Each Changed Over Recent Years?, we take a look at how the two companies’ businesses have evolved over the last 5 years.

A] How have Total Revenues for Seagate and WDC trended over the last 5 years?

  • WDC and Seagate have similar business models, catering to both retail clients and enterprises.
  • The only difference is that almost all of Seagate’s revenue comes from the sale of Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), while WDC is a major player in the flash memory market, as well.
  • WDC has seen a compounded revenue growth of 3.26% from 2015-2019, whereas Seagate’s revenue has declined at about 6.65% annually over the same period.
  • WDC’s growth can be attributed to the acquisition of Sandisk in mid-2016. SanDisk is a leading player in the flash memory market, and this has added to WDC’s revenue.
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  • WDC’s revenue saw a huge spike of 47% in 2017, due to the acquisition of SanDisk in May 2016.
  • Both companies have suffered in 2019, due to the drastic fall in demand in the memory market.
  • However, WDC has seen a larger drop in revenue, as declining NAND prices tend to affect the flash memory market much more than HDDs.

  • For both companies, 50-55% of revenue comes from Asia.
  • Over the last 5 years, Seagate has seen a cumulative drop in revenue of around $3.3 billion, of which more than $2.5 billion is from Asia sales itself.
  • For Seagate, the next biggest market is America (which makes about 33% of its revenue), whereas for WDC it is Europe, Middle East and Africa (bringing in about 27% of its revenue).

B] Comparing Revenues from Hard Disk Drives (HDD) for the two companies

  • Both companies have seen a gradual drop in Revenue from HDDs, as latest innovations have led to a drop in the cost per bit.
  • WDC’s HDD revenue has dropped at 10.5% annually, while Seagate has seen a compounded drop of around 7% over the same period.
  • More than 90% of Seagate’s revenue comes from HDDs, whereas for WDC, since the acquisition of flash-device manufacturer SanDisk in May ’16, only 50-55% of revenue comes from HDD sales.

C] How has total data capacity shipped trended over the last 5 years? (in exabytes, where 1 exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes)

  • The capacity shipped for both companies has clearly trended upward over the last 5 years, seeing consistent growth.
  • This is further proof of the drop in cost per bit, as even with increased shipments, the HDD Revenues for both companies have been gradually falling.


D] What has the trend been when it comes to number of HDD units sold by both companies?

  • The number of HDD units sold has dropped consistently for both companies.
  • Advancements in technology have led to an increase in the average capacity per drive, with drives as big as 3 TB and 4 TB easily available nowadays.
  • This has led to a drop in number of units sold as earlier people would buy more than one drive to satisfy their storage needs, but now a single drive of 2.5TB+ storage is usually more than sufficient.

E] How has Average Selling Price Per HDD unit changed over the last 5 years?

  • The average selling prices of HDDs have obviously seen an upward trend, even with the drop in cost per bit of data.
  • This is due to the companies manufacturing drives that are 2-3 times the capacity they were around 5 years ago, as the data storage needs of people have grown with time.

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