Western Digital fiscal Q3 clocked by inventory writedown

Western Digital’s fiscal third quarter results were hit by a writedown of inventory due to DRAM prices.

The company reported a third quarter net loss of $581 million, or $1.99 a share, on revenue of $3.7 billion. Non-GAAP earnings were $49 million, or 17 cents a share.

Western Digital took inventory charges of $110 million in cost of revenue in the fiscal third quarter. Western Digital also missed its second quarter targets. 

• Western Digital unveils new WD Blue SN500 NVMe SSD
• Western Digital expands NVMe SSD portfolio for cloud and edge workloads
• Western Digital debuts world’s fastest 1TB Sandisk Extreme microSD card

Wall Street was looking for Western Digital to report revenue of $3.68 billion with non-GAAP earnings of 46 cents a share. 

According to Western Digital, the third quarter was a rough one compared to a year ago when it reported non-GAAP earnings of $1.1 billion, or $3.63 a share, on revenue of $5 billion.

In a statement, Steve Milligan, CEO of Western Digital, said “the business environment remains soft, there are initial indications of improving trends.”

Milligan did say that he expects demand to improve for flash and hard drives for the remainder of calendar 2019. Western Digital said it is focused on advancing its product and technology while rightsizing its factory production and costs.  

Article source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/western-digital-fiscal-q3-clocked-by-inventory-writedown/#ftag=RSSbaffb68