Western Digital (WDC) FY2026 results: revenue $12.9 billion, up 35.7% on the year

Western Digital develops, manufactures and sells data storage devices and solutions built on hard disk drive technology. It was founded in 1970 and is headquartered in San Jose, California. Products are sold under the Western Digital and WD brands, and the company employed approximately 40,000 people worldwide at the end of fiscal 2026, spread across 24 countries, with approximately 88 percent in Asia Pacific and approximately 11 percent in the Americas. The financial year ends in early July.

A pure hard drive company since February 2025

On 21 February 2025 the company completed a separation into two independent public companies, with Western Digital keeping the hard drive business and Sandisk, formerly a wholly owned subsidiary, taking the Flash business. The filing states that the separation has positioned it as a pure-play hard drive company. Western Digital initially kept 28.8 million Sandisk shares and then used them to cut borrowings: 21.3 million shares in a tax-free exchange in June 2025 reduced about $800 million of principal on a term loan, 5.8 million shares in February 2026 redeemed four series of senior notes and the rest of that term loan, and the final 1.7 million shares were exchanged in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 for 4.8 million of its own shares, reducing the share count. As of 3 July 2026 it held no Sandisk shares.

Three end markets

Cloud is the largest and fastest growing of the three, covering public and private cloud environments and enterprise customers, served with high-capacity enterprise hard drives for data storage systems, tiered storage models and cases where data must be held reliably for years. Client covers original equipment manufacturers and channel customers buying high-performance drives for desktops and notebooks, where the design points are cost per gigabyte, quiet acoustics and low power consumption. Consumer covers external storage products sold globally through retail and channel partners. The filing's case for the product is that hard drives occupy a particular place in the market by providing an economical way to create, store and use ever more data, and that they give cloud customers a sustainable total cost of ownership advantage.

The technology

Hard drives store data by recording magnetic information on rotating disks, and the parts are recording heads, magnetic media, controllers and firmware, plus a printed circuit board assembly. Western Digital designs and manufactures substantially all of the recording heads and magnetic media itself, which makes it dependent on its own development for those parts rather than on other manufacturers, and it buys every remaining component and material externally. Capacity improvements, which lower product cost over time, have come mostly from advances in recording head and media technology. The multi-year roadmap for high-capacity drives names ePMR, OptiNAND, UltraSMR, heat-assisted magnetic recording and triple stage actuators. The patent portfolio runs to approximately 4,700 active patents.

Making it

Manufacturing drives is a complex process of producing and assembling precision components to narrow tolerances with rigorous testing, run in clean room environments where process engineering and efficient use of space control the operating cost. The company continually assesses which steps would benefit from automation, and uses contract manufacturers where that is strategically advantageous. Its vertically integrated in-house assembly and test operations are concentrated in Prachinburi and Bang Pa-In in Thailand, Penang, Johor Bahru and Kuching in Malaysia, Laguna in the Philippines, Shenzhen in China, and San Jose and Fremont in California. It generally keeps multiple suppliers for components, though for business or technology reasons some come from a single or sole source.

Who buys it

Sales go to hyperscale cloud service providers, neoclouds, computer manufacturers and other original equipment manufacturers, resellers, distributors and retailers worldwide, with long-term agreements in place with certain customers. Sales engagements involve customer technical support engineers and product engineers alongside salespeople, working with customers to design, test and qualify system solutions. Sales and marketing teams sit across the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East, and international sales were 60 percent of net revenue in fiscal 2026 against 55 percent in 2025 and 58 percent in 2024. Three customers accounted for 16 percent, 15 percent and 13 percent of net revenue in fiscal 2026; in 2024 no single customer reached 10 percent. Distributors and retailers get limited price protection and reimbursement of certain marketing spending, and there are sales incentive programmes for distributors, resellers and original equipment manufacturers.

From Western Digital's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 3 July 2026. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 14 August 2026: read the full 10-K.