Western Digital (WDC)

 

To remain a significant supplier of hard drives, we will need to offer a broad range of hard drive products to our customers. We currently offer a variety of 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop, enterprise, CE and external storage markets, and we also offer 2.5-inch form factor hard drives for the mobile, CE and external storage markets. However, demand for hard drives may shift to products in smaller other form factors, which our competitors may already offer. We recently entered into the sub-2.5-inch hard drive market with a 1.0-inch hard drive product, however the demand for the 1.0-inch form factor drive is significantly less than our initial estimates of this market, thus impairing our ability to realize revenue from this product.

 

In addition, the desktop and enterprise markets are transitioning from parallel interfaces, such as PATA and SCSI, to serial interfaces, such as SATA and SAS, to handle higher data transfer rates. We currently offer SATA products; however, the transition of technology and the introduction of new products are challenging and create risks. For example, acceptance of the SATA interface may not continue to grow, or customers may choose to purchase alternative interfaces that may not be compatible with future generations of SATA hard drives. Moreover, our customers may require new SATA features that we may not be able to deliver in a timely and cost effective manner.

 

While we continue to develop new products and look to expand into other hard drive markets, the success of our new product introductions is dependent on a number of factors, including difficulties faced in manufacturing ramp, market acceptance, effective management of inventory levels in line with anticipated product demand, and the risk that our new products may have quality problems or other defects in the early stages of introduction that were not anticipated in the design of those products. Further, we need to identify how any of the hard drive markets that we are expanding into may have different characteristics from the desktop market, such as, demand volume growth rates, demand seasonality, product generations development rates, customer concentrations, and cost and performance requirements, and we must properly address these differences. If we fail to successfully develop and manufacture new products and expand into new hard drive markets, customers may decrease the amount of our products that they purchase, and we may lose business to our competitors who offer these products.