Businessweek

Western Digital Corporation engages in the development and manufacture of storage products that enable people to create, manage, experience, and preserve digital content. The company designs and makes storage devices, networking equipment, and home entertainment products under the WD, HGST, and G-Technology brands. The company serves each of the primary markets addressing storage opportunities — enterprise and cloud data centers, client, consumer electronics, backup, the Internet, and other emerging markets, such as automotive and home and small office networking. The company operates its global business through two independent subsidiaries, including WD and HGST. The company’s principal products are hard drives that use one or more rotating magnetic disks (magnetic media) to store and allow fast access to data. Its hard drives are used in desktop and notebook computers, corporate and multiple types of data centers, home entertainment equipment and stand-alone consumer storage devices. The company’s other products include solid-state drives, home entertainment, and networking products and software applications for smart phones and tablets. Business Strategy The company’s focused business strategy is to be an industry-leading developer and manufacturer of storage products that enable people to create, manage, experience, and preserve digital content. Products The company offers a line of storage devices. Its hard drives include 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, capacities ranging from 30 gigabytes to 4 terabytes, nominal rotation speeds up to 15,000 revolutions per minute (RPM), and interfaces, such as advanced technology attachment (ATA) and serial attached SCSI (small computer system interface) (SAS). In addition, the company offers a family of hard drives specifically designed to consume substantially less power than standard drives, utilizing its WD GreenPower Technologytm. Its solid-state drives include 2.5-inch, mSATA, MO-297 and CompactFlash form factors, capacities ranging from 128 MB to 400 gigabytes, and interfaces, such as SAS, serial advanced technology attachment (SATA), and parallel advanced technology attachment (PATA). The company also participates in the mobile computing market of smart phones and tablets with standalone Western Digital software applications, such as WD Photos and WD2go for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platforms. Enterprise Storage Products Enterprise storage products consist of hard drives for performance enterprise and capacity enterprise, as well as solid-state drives for embedded applications. The company’s hard drive enterprise unit shipments were 16 million for 2012. Its enterprise storage products consist of: HGST Ultrastar capacity drives provide enterprise class and are primarily for use in data storage systems, in tiered storage models and where data must be stored for years and delivered across enterprise; HGST Ultrastar performance drives are optimized for performance applications. Ultrastar large form factor drives provide high capacity storage, primarily for data storage systems. Ultrastar small form factor drives provide a range of capacity and performance levels primarily for use in enterprise servers, supporting high volume on-line transactions, data analysis, and other enterprise applications. The Ultrastar SSD400S is designed for the ultimate performance storage tier, with up to 400 gigabytes of high endurance SLC NAND Flash; WD RE family of hard drives is designed for capacity storage enterprise applications; WD SiliconDrive family of solid-state drives features read/write speeds in high capacities and is designed for embedded system original equipment manufacturer (OEM) applications that require a long product life; and WD XE hard drives are designed for performance enterprise server and storage applications, such as data centers and large data arrays. Client: Desktop and Notebook PCs The company's client compute products consist of hard drives and solid-state drives for desktop and mobile PCs. Its hard drive client compute unit shipments were 150 million for 2012. The company’s client compute storage products consist of HGST