Thread regarding Seagate Technology Inc. layoffs

https://www.statista.com/statistics/398951/global-shipment-figures-for-hard-disk-drives/

Unit shipments are going down. It's what it is. Laptops transitioned to SSD and so did game consoles and now the vast majority of HDDs are sold to the cloud which over-provisions every byte on an HDD. This is not like your boomer parents using only 10% of the capacity of built in HDD of the laptop you gifted them in 2005. Deal with it.

SMH. If you ain't selling drives, you ain't got pricing power. It's that simple.

It's actually not that hard. The next time some dip**** procurement SVP from a big customer threatens to take share if you don't lower your price, you say "go ahead". Eventually, your competitor will get the message and do likewise. If you both keep lowering prices to get more share, you both deserve to be 25% GM companies.

I'm amused at all the keyboard warriors who seem to fancy themselves as supply chain experts. The one that really amused me was " If WCD and STX both got there sh-t together and were well run businesses prices could be higher." That is clear market collusion. They got busted for this a few decades ago and neither company wants to go there again.

Question for you "experts". Did you already see the Silicon Bank collapse coming and would have been able to shut down the lines?" Because that happened so fast that all companies were caught off guard by every major customer immediately shutting down capital purchases. How about the lagging Chinese economy? Were you reading that perfectly and know exactly how to react with your supply lines? I doubt that. Had you had any sense of how this is playing out, you would know that raising prices is not an option.

Sometimes is really hard to get a new concept through thick skulls who think this is the way the HDD industry has to be. No, no, it doesn't! It takes new leadership to change. The same old people aren't going to do anything different. That is for sure.

Spot on…

Exactly right. Inventory management plays into keeping prices higher as well and we know how poorly STX has done here. Having to dump a lot of older product means lowering prices. If WCD and STX both got there sh-t together and were well run businesses prices could be higher. Do you think Starbucks and Caribou are selling the $10 coffee by trying to undercut and inventory bo-b each other? Hmmmm? No, they are smart aren't they?

No they wouldn’t have done it already. Why ? Because it requires brains to think this way.

Look at the dram industry. Learn how to manage supply-demand to Keep Profits optimized with no new innovation.

@2vvp You are delusional. If they could raise prices 10-15% and get away with it, they would have done it already and boosted the dividend.

At the all company meetings I come away with a key motivation is making WDC suffer more than we do. It’s nuts folks.

Nah, If HDD prices were 10-15% higher it wouldn’t result in a significant SSD mass storage incursion at all. But it would dramatically improve STX financials including significant and dramatic gross margin gain. But nope, we’re going to give that away trying to undercut the other company thinking we are really going to get them this time.

@2rdi - Seriously? Raise prices on HDD while SSD is reducing theirs? Good luck with that! There is a reality and that is HDD is now ONLY used for mass storage, a segment that SDD has not yet conquered but raising HDD prices will certainly allow them to gain traction.

@2rdi+1qOyT5SS not sure I agree. The fact that there are only two players (if you don't count Toshiba) is that Hitachi and IBM could see that HDD were reaching the end of their fantastic areal density growth and that SSD would eventually take over. It's been long recognized that total HDD sales have been on a downward trajectory since 2010 at a rate of ~11% annually. If Seagate and WD had boosted prices at this point, it simply would have accelerated the push into SSD.

This HDD industry really ki-led itself by selling such an advanced product so cheaply with only 2 major players always trying to undercut and harm the other instead acting for mutual benefit. I never got the whole WDC is the enemy and must be destroyed talking points when both could raise prices and both companies would benefit greatly by having a indirect "understanding". My gosh, there's only 2 players and it's as close to a monopoly as you can get and they still can't figure out the power of mutually beneficial pricing power? Super d-mb. Really profoundly d-mb. But nope, we're instead going to aggressively price to "get" WDC and deal them a death blow I guess while we sell off assets for cash. The customers for STX and WDC are probably pleased they can still keep these 2 suppliers fighting and sufficiently manipulate price favorably.

perhaps the Longmont CTL has an opinion?

Thanks for the update BS

@6zrs+1qEKR9I4 we know exabytes shipped is a proxy metric for growth, when ASP matters for revenue and margin as drives sold decrease as TB/per drive increases