In short: The sixth name on Evercore's second-half tech-hardware list, inside the same storage/networking basket Brown says trades together regardless of the differences between the businesses. Context only — no individual committee call on it this episode.
In short: The other storage name dragging on tech at the open. No committee call.
In short: Alger (Focus Equity Fund): the supply-discipline read on hard drives. "The HDD industry is highly consolidated, with only two scaled manufacturers, and Western Digital holds a leading market position," with the mix "structurally shifted toward cloud customers as consumer exposure has declined." The key sentence is about behaviour, not demand: "industry participants have emphasised capital discipline — prioritizing higher areal density (i.e., more terabytes per drive) rather than adding significant unit capacity — which supports a healthier supply/demand balance and improved profitability." Fiscal Q3 revenue and earnings beat on "an improved pricing environment that lifted margins above the company's prior guidance."
Western Digital makes hard disk drives — the spinning magnetic storage that remains the cheapest way to keep very large amounts of data. Most of its sales now go to cloud providers rather than consumers, which makes it a supplier to the data-centre build-out rather than to the PC cycle.
Alger's thesis is about industry behaviour, not demand. Only two companies still make these drives at scale, and both have chosen to increase how much data fits on each disk rather than build more factories. That restraint keeps supply tight, which is why prices and margins came in above the company's own guidance last quarter.
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In short: Part of the memory complex that spiked Jul 21 (WDC +8%, Sandisk +9%, SK Hynix +9%, Micron +8%) on the Morgan Stanley memory-price call — "we took that opportunity to trim a little bit and then added back at the end of this past week, and it looks like Monday's going to be a good day." Reports this week in the big tech earnings block.
Western Digital makes storage drives, and it's part of the same memory-shortage basket as Micron and SanDisk. It jumped 8% on July 21 when Morgan Stanley called for 25% memory price increases. Singh trimmed the basket into that spike and bought it back at the end of the week — a trading position within a structurally tight market, with earnings due in this week's tech block.
Full passage: premium transcript (PDF).
In short: Another component maker booking data-center orders as immediate revenue — one of the supplier gains he stripped out to show S&P earnings growth was really single-digit.
Western Digital makes storage (hard drives and flash). It's in the same bucket as Nvidia and Micron: a component supplier booking data-center orders as instant revenue, so its earnings look inflated by the buildout. When Fred asked AI to strip these supplier gains out of the S&P's profits, the market's "28% growth" shrank to single digits — Western Digital was one of the names he removed.
8:36And the S&P 500 earnings growth rate was single-digit growth. So when we talk about an earnings bubble, we have these massive earnings showing, I think it was 28% in Q1, but you strip out the 40% from the one-time markup gains and it's 16%. And then if you strip out the gains from all these companies, which is just the hyperscaler spending, then you're down to single digits.
In short: Named as one of the three memory names the market has rotated into — "Micron, Western Digital, Sandisk… They are all up +200 to +700% this year." The mean-reversion argument is made through Micron specifically; Western Digital is listed as part of the same complex without its own analysis.
In short: Brown: memory/storage beneficiary of the DRAM/NAND price surge — among "our stocks today."
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