I vested heavily already and will buy more if can get more fund. All the company director and IBs have been accumulating big amount. Fully confidence in this counter.
The same research house (RHB) today release another TA report telling investor to liquidate. They desperate for price to remain low to collect. Buy/ hold and you will not regret.
Western Digital Corp.’s “Positive” Rating Reaffirmed at Stifel Nicolaus (WDC)
Posted by Joseph Griffin on Dec 20th, 2013 // No Comments Share on StockTwits
Western Digital Corp. logoWestern Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC)‘s stock had its “positive” rating restated by equities research analysts at Stifel Nicolaus in a research note issued to investors on Friday, Analyst Ratings Network.com reports.
The analysts wrote, “We maintain our Buy rating on shares of Western Digital and increase our target price to $105 (was $82); our new target price reflects 12.3x P/E & ~7.1x EV/EBITDA and a ~10% FCF yield on our C2015 estimates. While investors should, in our view, continue to question the sustainability of a +130M/qtr HDD ship TAM into 1H2014 and expect focus on SSDs/Flash vs. HDDs (we continue to emphasize Flash capacity supply vs. HDDs), the underlying capacity demand and favorable cloud-driven mix shift impacts, coupled with the industry’s underlying financial model considerations (GM% consistency/upside potential vs. 27%-32% model, opex management, ROIC, FCF, and shareholder returns), we believe investor sentiment will remain positive on the HDD industry. We believe it is important to understand the transition in the HDD industry as storage capacity shifts from personal devices to the cloud, and thus shifts focus toward capacity shipped and the potential for HDD vendors to move into more of a cloud-driven solutions sales role over the long term.”
In other Western Digital Corp. news, Insider James Murphy sold 6,246 shares of the company’s stock on the open market in a transaction dated Friday, December 6th. The stock was sold at an average price of $78.72, for a total value of $491,685.12. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now directly owns 66,884 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $5,265,108. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link.
A number of other analysts have also recently weighed in on WDC. Analysts at Needham & Company reiterated a “strong-buy” rating on shares of Western Digital Corp. in a research note to investors on Thursday. They now have a $100.00 price target on the stock, up previously from $81.00. Separately, analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded shares of Western Digital Corp. from a “neutral” rating to an “overweight” rating in a research note to investors on Tuesday. They now have a $100.00 price target on the stock, up previously from $56.00. Finally, analysts at Zacks reiterated a “neutral” rating on shares of Western Digital Corp. in a research note to investors on Friday, December 13th. They now have a $83.00 price target on the stock. Seven equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, twelve have given a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the company’s stock. Western Digital Corp. currently has an average rating of “Buy” and an average target price of $81.07.
Shares of Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC) opened at 82.10 on Friday. Western Digital Corp. has a 1-year low of $41.05 and a 1-year high of $84.70. The stock’s 50-day moving average is $75.53 and its 200-day moving average is $67.99. The company has a market cap of $19.402 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 20.91.
Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, October 24th. The company reported $2.05 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, meeting the consensus estimate of $2.05. The company had revenue of $3.80 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $3.78 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company posted $2.36 earnings per share. The company’s revenue for the quarter was down 5.7% on a year-over-year basis. On average, analysts predict that Western Digital Corp. will post $8.08 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.
The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which is scheduled for Wednesday, January 15th. Stockholders of record on Friday, December 27th will be paid a dividend of 0.30 per share. This represents a $1.20 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 1.46%. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, December 24th. This is a boost from Western Digital Corp.’s previous quarterly dividend of $0.25.
Western Digital Corporation (NYSE:WDC) is a provider of solutions for the collection, storage, management, protection and use of digital content, including audio and video.
We are upgrading Seagate Technology to Outperform from Sector Perform with a $53 price target, which is based on eight times our fiscal 2015 earnings-per-share estimate.
We believe investors are not appreciating the opportunities for hard-disk-drive (HDD) makers in the build out of cloud infrastructure, and that they are overly concerned about declining PC sales and the potential of HDDs losing market share to flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs). Enterprise drives constitute only 15% of Seagate's (ticker: STX) unit sales but 39% of its gross profit.
Also, a shift toward enterprise drives benefits margins; enterprise margins are 70% to 80% higher than PC drive margins. As HDD business models get weighted toward enterprise drives, margins could improve, in our view. [image]
Our recent Asia trip and retail pricing checks suggest that HDD pricing continues to be stable.
We believe HDD vendors trade at an attractive valuation of greater than 13% free-cash-flow yield and have aggressive capital-allocation strategies.
We believe Western Digital (WDC) (rated at Sector Perform) also benefits from the positive trends in the HDD industry. However, we prefer Seagate due to Seagate's aggressive capital-allocation strategy and we also believe Western paid a significantly high premium for the Virident Systems acquisition (25 times to 30 times Virident's annual revenue).
Seagate has double-digit growth in enterprise/capacity drives and 35% of its enterprise revenue is from its top nine cloud- and Web-scale customers. Enterprise drives constitute only 15% of its net sales but about 39% of its gross profit, while PC-related sales constitute about 65% of units but only 40% of gross profit, per our estimates.
Also, margins from enterprise drives are 70% to 80% higher than PC margins. Therefore, a shift to enterprise/capacity drives should benefit margins for the HDD companies. As HDD models get weighted toward enterprise drives, margins could improve.
We believe the market is overly concerned about potential for share loss to flash. World-wide NAND capacity is less than 45 exabytes per year, and about 85% of that capacity is used for mobile devices, flash cards and USB drives. This means that only about 15% of NAND capacity, which is actually less than 1% of total drive capacity, competes with HDD applications. Due to increasing capital intensity, lower output from the same semiconductor fabrication plants, and declining benefits of shrinks, NAND vendors are being highly rational about adding new capacity, which means that the argument that NAND will replace HDDs sounds highly exaggerated. HDDs are more than 10 times cheaper than flash. And since flash and HDDs are following the same cost-decline curve, we believe the cost differential could continue.
Seagate has raised its dividend three times in the past two years, and has talked about raising the dividend by at least 10% every year. The company is targeting to buy back 30 million to 35 million shares in F2014. Also, our discussions with the company suggest that Seagate is committed to reducing its outstanding share count from 370 million in the last quarter to about 250 million by calendar 2014.
We believe consolidation in the HDD industry could lead to better margins for the remaining vendors. Both Seagate and Western Digital have been very vocal about maintaining margins, and they show no inclination of increasing their market share through aggressive pricing. We believe investors are not appreciating the opportunities for HDD vendors in the build-out of cloud infrastructure and are overly concerned about declining PC sales and the potential share loss to flash. Enterprise drives constitute only 15% of Seagate's unit sales but about 39% of its gross profit. Also, a shift toward enterprise drives benefits margins as enterprise margins are 70% to 80% higher than PC margins. As HDD models get weighted toward enterprise drives, margins should improve, in our view.
Speakup, current SSD price still 10 X the price of HDD making it a very expensive and unaffordable mass storage medium. if you can make and sell me a 1 terabyte SSD drive for the same price as a 1 terabyte HDD drive, then I might agree with you.
This book is the result of the author's many years of experience and observation throughout his 26 years in the stockbroking industry. It was written for general public to learn to invest based on facts and not on fantasies or hearsay....
BBB79
2,689 posts
Posted by BBB79 > 2014-01-07 17:33 | Report Abuse
chrisho87, you are too optimistic, if can reach 0.75, should be very good already...