Western Digital conference call: Storage demand is experiencing "leapfrog growth", with a compound annual growth rate exceeding 25%, and order visibility extending to 2029.

After the US stock market closed on April 30, Western Digital Corporation (WDC.US) released its financial report for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026. The company achieved revenue of $3.3 billion, a year-on-year increase of 45%, exceeding the upper limit of guidance. Earnings per share reached $2.72, a significant increase of 97% year-on-year, almost doubling. In terms of shipments, Western Digital Corporation delivered 222 EB of data to customers this quarter, an increase of 34% year-on-year. Among them, cloud business was the absolute driver of growth, with revenue reaching $3 billion, accounting for 89% of total revenue, a year-on-year increase of 48%. In terms of profit margin, thanks to the transformation towards high-capacity drives and pricing strategy execution, Western Digital Corporation's gross margin soared to 50.5%, an increase of 1040 basis points year-on-year. CFO Kris Sennesael pointed out at the meeting: We achieved a strong gross margin in the third quarter, breaking through the 50% range. The company expects revenue of $3.65 billion in the next quarter, with gross margin further increasing to the range of 51% to 52%, and diluted earnings per share expected to be $3.25. CEO Irving Tan stated that as AI workloads extend from model training to large-scale inference, and the emergence of Agentic AI and physical AI frameworks, data generation is at a turning point. This will drive storage demand to show "step-like growth," and the company maintains a high level of confidence in the steady annual growth rate of storage capacity exceeding 25% in the long term. AI development is facing a structural transformation: "Every inference is creating data that must be stored." Compared to the impressive current data, management dissects the underlying logic of data storage in the AI era. The full translation of the Western Digital Corporation 2026 Q3 earnings call can be found in the provided text from this source.