Western Digital Corporation ($WDC)

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the first day of the BofA Global Tech Conference. Delighted you could all make it. See a lot of familiar faces here. Welcome again. I appreciate you all joining us today. I'm Wamsi Mohan, I cover IT hardware and supply chain for the bank. Today, I'm delighted to welcome WD CFO, Kris Sennesael. We also have the WD IR team. We have Ambrish and Amitesh sitting back here as well if you have follow-up questions after the session is done. Kris, glad you could join us. I know you have a little bit of a quick spiel on your disclaimer to go through first, and then we'll kick it off.

Yes, and good morning, Wamsi, and thanks for hosting us here at your conference. And before we start, I just want to remind everybody that, today, I will be making some forward-looking statements based on my current assumptions and expectations, including related to our product portfolio, business plans, performance and future financial results. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. So please go look to our SEC filings, our Form 10-K, and that provides more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. We will also be making some reference to non-GAAP financial measures, so please go to our website where you can find a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP. We're done. Let's dive into it.

All right. Right. That was read quickly, so I appreciate that. Well, Kris it's been a phenomenal year for you guys. And I would say that the market is starting to look at HDDs somewhat differently. You're seeing that in your results. You're seeing that in the numbers. The question that we generally get is sustainability of this. And so maybe to kick it off, right? I think for baseline HDD exabyte growth of 25%, it can be a little bit higher or lower, somewhere in that range. But when you think about that growth rate at these kind of levels, we now we're starting to ship materially more exabytes. I mean we're talking about a 1.5 zettabytes going to closer to 2 zettabytes, which is just an incredible amount of storage. What are some of the underpinnings that you're looking at that give you confidence around the fundamental premise of this growth in data?

Yes. No, it's a great time to be at WD and be part of the storage environment, that's part of the bigger AI data center build-out, right? And let's just go back a little bit in February of 2025 just on or about the time when the company separated their flash business and became a strategically focused hard disk drive company. The company did an Analyst Day. And at that time, we were expecting the exabyte growth to be mid-teens. And that was mostly driven by the cloud, right? The cloud, which is 8 billion people taking pictures, taking video, uploading that into the cloud, multiplying that through social media as well as every company on the planet that stores all their data more and more into the cloud. We also indicated at that time that there was a possibility for stronger growth if and when AI kicks in. And we didn't have really good visibility into that. But a lot of things has happened since then. First of all, we've created a lot better visibility by deeper customer engagements, right, having deep ongoing conversations with all our customers, mostly the hyperscalers that provided a lot better visibility to us also longer term, multi, multiyears out. And as a result of that, in February of '26 at our Innovation Day, we've indicated that we think exabyte growth is going to be at mid-20s, call it, on or about 25% CAGR for the next 3 to 5 years. Although since then, we had further discussions with our customers and at our last earnings call, we've now indicated that we believe export could be well above 25% CAGR for the next 3 to 5 years. And so where is that coming on? Well, first of all, the cloud continues to be a strong growth driver, just the traditional cloud. But in addition, yes, we have seen AI kicking in, right? AI kicking in, in multiple ways. First of all, it started by training and vast amounts of data lakes were created to support the training of the multi-model large language models, right? As a multi-model because it was not just only tax base, but also picture, still pictures and video. And so massive amounts of data was being stored to create those large language models. By the way, that is not over, right? The hyperscalers continue to train, retrain, relearn, create new data sets to create the next generation of large language models. But we've also started moving into inferencing. And for us at the beginning, it wasn't clear what inferencing going to do for us. But now as we see more and more inferencing, probably 2/3 of the compute that's being installed is being used today for inferencing. We see a huge demand for data storage because all the data that's being generated, while doing inferencing and the output of it with much of the logic, how they got to the output is all being stored. It's being stored. And that's the case for simple chat box activity, but also more and more agentic AI where you have a lot more complex inferencing interactions, a lot more rich output and all of that is getting stored. That's not being stored as being fed back into the models for retraining and learning as well. And then last but not least, and that's just the beginning, is physically AI. Physical AI I think about autonomous cars, robotics all the way to humanoids, right? What does those devices have in common? They have multiple cameras on it and they constantly shoot video, all that video footage is being stored for training and upgrading and learning of the algorithms. There is actually not enough data that's being -- or video footage that's being captured so that now those companies use AI to create synthetic data to feed into their learning algorithms. And so the amount of data just keeps growing exponentially. And again, as we talk our customers, we get more and more conviction about plus 25% exabyte growth for the next 3 to 5 years.

Yes. No, a lot of incredible drivers of data growth over here. So maybe just -- you mentioned sort of the visibility that you're getting from your customers? Can you talk a little bit about how is this different from what you've seen in the past in terms of visibility? How do we ensure that we're not getting ahead of our results in some way that indeed, we are shipping to demand and not sort of shipping in excess of demand anywhere because that's generally how these cycles end to tend to get broken in some ways. And not that there are any signs of that at the moment, but can you just talk about visibility, the type of contract structures, the things that you're looking at to ensure that we're shipping sort of maybe even below demand levels probably. But like if you can maybe elaborate on that.

Yes. So first of all, I mean, today, our hard disk drive business is totally different than compared to what it was 3 or 5 or 10 years ago. and the multiple cycles that we have gone through. I mean, it's not that long ago, 3, 5 years ago, more than 50% of our business was still consumer and client PC. And fast forward to today, 90% of our business is with the cloud, with the hyperscalers, right? And so that's a different business. That's a business where it's almost like a planned economy, right, those guys, they take 3, 5, 10 years out and how much data centers gigawatt compute power, but also exabyte or zettabytes of storage they have to build over the next 3, 5, 10 years. So it's really a lot longer visibility, a lot more plant in advance which takes out somewhat of the cyclicality, right. And so that is the big change again like 90% of our revenue tied to hyperscalers. With those hyperscalers, they are -- again, they think ahead a long time, and it's actually the customers that came to us who wanted to secure the supply. We were not the suppliers that were pushing long-term agreements on to our customers. It was a collaboration customers, again, who see that the demand is growing extremely strong. The supply is there, but it's tight. It's a very tight environment. And so customers wanted to secure supply, but in a collaborative way, right? So for them, it's important that they provide the visibility about the data centers they build, about their technology and product needs that they have. And we did the same thing. We shared our capacity expansion plans, which we can talk more about that later. It's based on technology and product road map, right? And so it's a very collaborative environment where you create a lot more visibility multiple years out. I'm not nervous about how overbuilding or inventory build. I mean everything what we ship today is getting deployed right away, right? And I think there's multiple industry reports out there that indicate that demand is at least today is bigger than supply. And even in the next couple of years, many industry analysts expect that demand supply will continue to be very tight, again, part because the demand growth is so strong.

So maybe to touch on that a little bit, right? You mentioned sort of this multiyear visibility. These are customers who are planning out well in advance. Can you talk a little bit more about the specifics around that? Like for instance, if you have a hyperscale customer or do they talk about? In the next 1 year, we want 100 exabytes in the next following year, we want 100 exabytes. As you think about the planning for that, what is the variation or variability around these demand levels that you and your customers kind of talk about on average? And then what about pricing? So those are obviously the 2 big variables that as you're managing the business, you're looking at how many exabytes and what you can charge for that. These long-term agreements that you have, how does that play out across your entire set of customers.

Yes. So I mean, today, there is -- in terms of variability, every time we talk to them, they seem to be asking for more. So that's kind of the variability we see today. But let's -- I mean, we, again, we changed our business model drastically. Again, if you look at it 3, 5 years ago, I mean we were getting orders for shipment within current quarter, right? That is no longer the case. We've dedicated our customer base that it takes 52 weeks to end-to-end to manufacture a hard disk drive. It takes 9 months to produce the wafers that go into the heads and then 3 months to put everything into the box and create a hard disk drive. So it's end-to-end, it's 12 months. And so our customers realize that. And now most of our larger hyperscalers and larger customers, they place their orders 52 weeks in advance, right. And so we have pretty good visibility for the next 12 months or so. Now again, some of those customers, they wanted to secure supply longer out, '27, '28, '29. Some of them would love to sign LTAs all the way until 2032. Now for us, it's not important necessarily the structure of the agreement, it's all about the visibility, right? We and our customers, we want visibility about the exabytes multiple years out. We also want to have some visibility about the pricing and the pricing environment. Now, again, there is -- it's slightly different customer to customer, and there is some variability there, again, the most important thing for me for the LTAs is the mutual increased visibility, predictability of the business.

Yes. So as you think about -- I mean we get this question often about pricing, right? So if really demand is so much in excess of supply, then why is it that pricing is -- and pricing has been very strong. I mean relative to history, we've seen dollars per terabyte declined 15%, 10%. Now for the rest of the year, it's probably going to be a high single to like maybe potentially higher than that. So we're entering a new phase of pricing. But -- when you look at other areas within the industry that have kind of become some call it, some type of bottleneck for whether it's NAND or DRAM pricing is going up, 100% quarter-on-quarter. Optical, like pricing is going up a lot. So it feels like pricing potentially has the potential to go up a lot. So how do you manage that balance of visibility versus pricing and being able to capture some of the upside, which you are, but is there room to do more?

Yes. So we definitely, as WD, like a strategically focused hard disk drive company, we play differently than what you see in the memory where you have multiple participants that sell into multiple end markets and where you actually do have some spot pricing, right? And demand and supply is dictating what the prices are and prices go up and prices go down all the time. That's not how we play it as WD and the hard disk drive business. We really want to create long-term value for our customers, for ourselves and our shareholders, right? And that means being very thoughtful in the short, medium and long term. And our pricing, I would really say is value based, right? The more value we provide to our customers, the more we can trust to our customers because the more value it creates for our customers. And we do that, again, based on a technology and product transition, right, as we move to higher capacity drives and/or higher performance drives that create more value for our customers. And customers are willing to pay for more value, right? We actually can charge a little bit more on a price per terabyte and still increase better total cost of ownership for our customers, right? And so that's what we have been doing. If you look at in February of 2026, I indicated that I expect price on the price per terabyte to be mid- to high single digits increase year-over-year for all 4 quarters. We announced our March results and ASP per terabyte was up 9% on a year-over-year basis on a price per terabyte basis. So mid- to high, we're definitely at the high end. And so that really indicates that, yes, the environment is very strong. And we see it continue to be strong for multiple years. Again, based on the fact that we have a technology and product road map, that will continue to deliver more value over time as we move to higher capacity and higher performance drives.

Okay. One more question on pricing, which is, when you think about the 90% of the bits that are going into the data center. There's probably 70% of that, that's hyperscaler and then 30% of that, that's enterprise-centric. These long-term agreements that you're striking are generally with the hyperscaler capacities. The enterprise, you have more discretion in pricing where the demand could be up or down a little bit more cyclical relative to the hyperscalers, but then pricing could also have more upside. Is that the right way to think of it?

Yes. Yes, absolutely. I mean we have been raising prices as well in our consumer and client business, and we have been raising prices across the board. Again, as we provide more value to all those customers. And -- but in certain areas, if you think about consumer and client, the ASP increases actually were above the company average. So yes, there's definitely opportunities there, and we're constantly testing the market, right, and see what value can we extract for the value that we provide.

Yes. I mean you're in a completely different regime when you look at gross margins, right, like in the sense of putting a historical lens on it, seems absurd at this point because we've -- historically, the targets were in the low 30s and you're at the 50% gross margin levels. Incremental margins are even more impressive. Incremental gross margins can be 70% to 100% range. So what is it about your road map that gives you confidence and comfort around very strong continued both gross margins and incremental gross margins.

Yes. Yes. No, gross margins, I mean, last quarter, we ended the new zip code starting with a 5.

Yes, congratulations.

Which is great. But again, it is -- to me, it's all based it starts with our technology and product road map, right? As we move to higher capacity drives and work on performance improvements, but especially move to higher capacity drives, that provides more value for our customers. And as we provide more value for our customers to translate in a better price per terabyte, right? And that, again, despite a higher price per terabyte, you still for our customers, creates more value. At the same time, moving to higher capacity drives lowers the cost per terabyte because it doesn't cost that much more to produce a 40 terabyte drive versus a 32-terabyte drive, right? It's all by increasing the aerial density per platter that gets you to the higher capacity drives. And so that results in a lower cost per terabyte. And we have a road map in front of us for many years. I mean, today, the highest capacity we ship is 32 terabytes, but we are qualifying our next-generation ePMR at 40 terabyte as well in parallel we'll be qualifying our first-generation HAMR at 44 terabyte. But we have a road map to drive that 50 to 60 to 70, 200, 200-plus terabyte and not too far distance, right? And just a combination of that, again, will provide more value to our customers, allow us to increase price per terabyte while at the same time, reduce cost per terabyte. And that results in those -- yes, a very nice incremental gross margins. The last couple of quarters, to your point, incremental gross margins was in the 70%, 75% range, right? That's how we have moved the overall gross margins now in the low 50s, but I think for many, many years, there is further improvement possible there.

Yes. It's just exciting. Maybe just to talk a little bit about the technology end of things, right? You mentioned areal density increases effectively are water driving capacity increases. So as you think about your road map here you kind of have a dual road map with having both continued PMR, but also HAMR, which you just spoke about. How do you think about as you go over the next 2, 3 years, the mix shifting between these is, would you be standardizing on [ 1-1 ] over time? What does that time frame look like?

Yes. And so I mean customers don't really -- let's start with that, right? Customers don't really care what the recording technology is. They don't care if it's ePMR or HAMR or CMR or UltraSMR. The 2 flavors of ePMR and the 2 flavors of HAMR. They want reliable, scalable high-performance exabytes of storage, right? And so that's the most important thing for our customers. But we -- again, we have an industry-leading technology road map, right? And we're -- again, today, we ship in 32 terabytes. We're in qualification with ePMR with 3 customers that will ramp in the second half of calendar year in a pretty steep ramp because, again, ePMR is a known technology. Our customers have 10 years of experience with that technology comes in a CMR and an UltraSMR version. And so we can -- we and our customers can actually scale that very quickly. And again, that comes all the way up to 40 terabytes. In parallel, we have been working for many years on our HAMR technology. Great progress being made. We're in qualification with 4 customers right now, and we intend to ramp in the first half of calendar year '27, initially coming at up to 40 terabyte HAMR drives. We still believe that we can continue to drive further capacity improvements on ePMR 50, maybe 60. But probably that's where ePMR recording technology will -- it's going to be hard to do more than that. I mean you never know engineers. We have a lot of smart engineers. We always try to find more, but that's kind of like the current understanding. And that's why we need HAMR, right? HAMR for us is the part not only to get to 50, 60, but to get to 70, 100, 100-plus. And it's all, again, driven by areal density. That's the most important part, right? We want the industry-leading areal density. Today, we're at 4 terabyte per platter. But we have a path to get up to 5, 6, 7, 10, 10 plus. In addition to that, and that's a little bit unique to WD. We always look at the opportunity as well to add more platters in per hard disk drive, right? Because there is economics. If you can get from 10 to 11 plates, which today we are at 11 -- that gives you an additional cost advantage, right? If we can get it to 12 or 14 or more than 14, there is an additional benefit. But for sure, the most important 1 is driving that areal density from the 4 terabytes we have now to 10 and more than 10 terabytes in the future.

So I know a lot of investors are probably thinking about sustainability from a different standpoint, too, right? CapEx levels that we're seeing are from hyperscalers or events. I mean, talk withstanding the Google announcement from yesterday, right? Like so this commitment to go build more seems to be extremely strong at the moment. As we think about the next few years, if we enter into a domain where CapEx, let's say, from hyperscaler starts to plateau, how do you think about the business and managing the business in that scenario? And how coupled should we be thinking is your growth to cloud CapEx directly because data is different than compute and CapEx intensity could be different in different areas. So how do you think about that, and if it plateaus how do you manage that?

Yes. To me, I mean, there is a certain link, right? The more data centers are being built and the more compute power is being built that results in more data being generated and the need for more data storage. And so there is somewhat of a link there. But if you look at -- I mean, the spend on hard disk drives by the hyperscalers is probably on or about, what, $30 billion or so out of their $700 billion of CapEx. So it's relatively small. Having said that, right, sometimes I worry as well. I mean, are they going to continue to spend $600 million, $700 million, maybe soon $1 trillion on mostly compute power and so on. And what will happen if that starts to slow down. Well, again, there is a difference between compute and data storage, right? Compute power is being reused all the time. I mean it takes whatever, 3 seconds to generate a token you generate the token, the compute power is available again for another 6 seconds or 10 seconds of compute to generate something. That's not the case we have storage, right? Storage keeps compounding. Every time you generate a token and you generate an output that gets stored. And the next 6 seconds that compute power is being used to generate something that gets stored. And so every time you use compute power, you get more and more storage out of it. And so in my mind, even if the CapEx on compute and memory, which is really closely tied to the compute cycle there, slows down over time, who knows. That does not indicate to me that the spend on storage will slow down, right? It's decoupled.

And so as you think about managing that, right, there's an underlying assumption of this exabyte growth that sort of is also predicated somewhat loosely maybe on this growth in CapEx. But if, let's say, that we were to see a change in the trajectory in the exabyte growth, what are the levers that you can use and the visibility, I think, that you're trying to establish and this pricing sort of more deterministic pricing in some ways, all sort of feeds into that, right? So as you think about a potential maybe deceleration in growth, the ways to manage that? Like what are some of the levers and you're sitting in your seat CFO you would take?

Yes. So we definitely a lot more disciplined than compared to 3, 5 or 10 years ago on multiple factors, right? First of all, disciplined from a pricing point of view, again, we want to get paid based on value right? It doesn't matter what the cost is of the product. It's based on value. And wherever you are in the cycle, you have to remain very disciplined on pricing. Second, of course, is on capacity, in the past and other industries have made the mistake, right? The demand is strong, you go spend a couple of billion dollars and add more capacity. We are not doing that. We, at WD, are not doing that. We are not spending CapEx dollars to support unit capacity expansion, right? But we do believe that we can support the strong demand growth, which I talked about it earlier, of plus 25% exabyte growth right, through our technology and product roadmap by moving to high-capacity drives. That will require some CapEx because we need to invest in our head and media operation, right? Because we might -- also, if we not only work on areal density, but on more platters per box, you need more hats and you need better hats and you need different media and better media and maybe more media as well. But we are not spending CapEx to add unit capacity, right. And so that, I think, sets us up really well I mean, again, I don't see it slowing down in the next 3 to 5 years based on the inputs I get from my customers. But mean every business on the planet is what cyclical, right? Although it's a secular growth business, but it will be somewhat cyclical if things slow down or speed up, we will adjust that by working on our technology and product road map, and we are not adding unit capacity. And that I think is a lot different compared to what happened 3, 5 or 10 years ago.

Yes. And I think maybe an analogy and I often get asked this question about like, well, when the transition happened from fleet to 3D NAND brought a lot more bits on there in the kind of killed it. Is HAMR going to bring a ton more capacity online. I guess the difference is you don't need to run at the same utilization rate of your fabs like the NAND does. So you do have more flexibility in managing output. So maybe to close, and I know there's a lot to talk, but it's already -- we're out of time. Maybe to close, Kris. I would love to get your thoughts from your seat on you're generating tremendous amounts of cash. You've kind of gone through this liquidation of well, or disposition of your stake in SanDisk. It's been amazingly great for you guys. So as you think about putting all of those things together, how should investors think about capital return, allocation of capital. But what do you think we should look forward to, when you're throwing off so much free cash flow?

Yes. First of all, I mean, the free cash flow is extremely strong. We are approaching 30% free cash flow margin, which is on or about $1 billion of cash per quarter. So very strong free cash flow. Second, the balance sheet is clean and strong, right. At the end of last quarter, we were down to $1.6 billion of debt and we have $2 billion of cash. We're actually in a positive net cash position. And at the end of last quarter, I still had 1.7 million outstanding shares. And so -- which we still are working on a monetization as well. So strong cash flow. Strong and healthy balance sheet. What do we do with all the free cash flow we generate? We return it back to the shareholder, right? Through a combination of our dividend program and share buyback program. The dividend, we've already increased it twice and we will, in the future, continue to increase it. But the vast majority of the free cash flow is being returned through the share buyback program. And there, there is no hesitation. I know we have seen a nice run in the stock, but I do intrinsic value, I look at the intrinsic value of the company, I look 3, 5 years out. based on my projected revenue growth, my growth and operating margin expansions, my strong free cash flow that we'll continue to expand. And so there's no hesitation to return all the cash back through share buyback.

Excellent. Unfortunately, we have to end it over there. Kris thank you so much. Really appreciate you being here.

Thanks. Thanks for having us. Thank you.

Thank you.