Western Digital (WDC)

 

Under our business plan, we are developing and manufacturing a substantial portion of the heads used in some of the product families of hard drives we manufacture. Consequently, we are more dependent upon our own development and execution efforts and less able to take advantage of head technologies developed by other head manufacturers. Technology transition for head designs is critical to increasing our volume production of heads. There can be no assurance, however, that we will be successful in timely and cost-effectively developing and manufacturing heads for products using future technologies. We also may not effectively transition our head design and head technology to achieve acceptable manufacturing yields using the technologies necessary to satisfy our customers’ product needs, or we may encounter quality problems with the heads we manufacture. In addition, we may not have access to external sources of supply without incurring substantial costs. For example, we recently began using perpendicular recording heads in certain of our products. We face various challenges in ramping the manufacturing volume of these products and if we do not adequately address these challenges, or if we encounter quality problems with the heads we manufacture for these products, our continued shipment of these products may be delayed, impairing our ability to realize revenue from these products.