Fundamentals snapshot
WDC · NMS · Technology · Computer Hardware
Current price
$526.93
52-week range
$54.22 - $602.54
Market cap
$181.62B
One-glance verdict
Fair-value range $41.68 – $78.99 (cautious → optimistic — tap the ? for the math)
Wall Street consensus: $529.57 (881.8% higher than our fair-value estimate)
Buy below $43.15 for a 20% safety cushion
Balance sheet
Net cash $1.51B. Interest coverage shows how many times profit covers the interest bill.
What stands out
Quick scan of the biggest positives and negatives from the detailed checklist below.
What this company does
Western Digital makes and sells digital storage devices, like the hard drives inside computers or the external drives you use to back up photos. The company's income is primarily driven by selling these products to both individual consumers and the massive data centers that power cloud services like Google Drive and Netflix. Therefore, its business depends on the world's ever-growing need to store more digital information.
Founded in 1970 as a semiconductor manufacturer, Western Digital pivoted to the data storage industry in the late 1970s. A key turning point was the introduction of its own hard disk drives (HDDs) in 1988, which established it as a major player in the personal computer market. Over the years, it has grown through strategic acquisitions, including Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) in 2012 and SanDisk in 2016, which expanded its portfolio to include flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). These moves transformed the company into a comprehensive data storage leader, serving a wide range of customers from individuals to large data centers.
Western Digital makes devices that store digital information. Think of the memory in your computer, your portable backup drive, or the massive data centers that power websites like Google and Facebook—Western Digital creates the technology for all of these. Their main products are hard disk drives (HDDs), which use spinning disks to store data, and solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash memory for faster access. You might buy their products as a consumer under brands like WD, SanDisk, or WD_BLACK for your personal computer, gaming console, or for external storage.
This is Western Digital's largest business segment, making up the majority of its revenue. It sells high-capacity hard drives and solid-state drives to companies that operate massive data centers, often called hyperscalers, and other cloud service providers. These customers need to store enormous amounts of data for services like social media, online video streaming, and artificial intelligence (AI). This segment's revenue comes from selling these enterprise-grade (built for heavy, constant use) storage devices in large quantities.
The Client segment provides storage for personal computing devices. This includes the internal hard drives and solid-state drives that go into desktop computers, laptops, and even some consumer electronics. Major computer manufacturers are the primary customers for this segment. While a significant part of the business, it generally represents a smaller portion of total revenue compared to the Cloud segment.
This segment sells storage products directly to individuals through retail stores and online. These are products you might buy yourself, such as portable external hard drives (like the My Passport series), USB flash drives, and memory cards for cameras and phones under the SanDisk brand. This is the smallest of the three main business segments by revenue.
The company is heavily focused on the growing data storage needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud data centers. Management is investing in new technologies like Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to create hard drives with even larger storage capacities to meet this demand. A major strategic move is the planned separation of its Flash (SSD) and HDD businesses into two independent, publicly traded companies. The goal is to allow each business to have a sharper focus and attract investors interested in their specific markets.
Price history
Earnings history
Click any quarter to read the call summary and what the numbers say.
Is it cheap or expensive?
Wall Street consensus is the average analyst price target: $529.57 (881.8% higher than our fair-value estimate).
Buy below $43.15 for a 20% safety cushion. That means buying at least 20% below our fair value, as a buffer in case our estimate turns out too rosy.
Our most-likely fair value is $53.94 a share — about 89.8% below today's price of $526.93, so the stock currently looks expensive (overvalued).
Is it drowning in debt?
Net cash $1.5B - more cash than debt. Interest coverage 6.0x.
Western Digital Corporation's profit covers its interest bill about 6.0 times over. which is weaker than most peers shown here.
Total debt $1.72B Interest coverage 5.97x This is the baseline the peer rows are being compared against.
Total debt $10.80B Interest coverage 20.56x +245% vs WDC Carries about 3.4x more debt cushion than WDC.
Total debt $21.30B Interest coverage 14.05x +136% vs WDC Carries about 2.4x more debt cushion than WDC.
What you should know
The numbers
Tap any ? icon to learn what it means.
Valuation
Profitability
Health
Growth
Cash flow
Dividend
Metric explainer
Debt comparison
What you should know