Western Digital Corporation

Good afternoon, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Western Digital's third quarter fiscal 2025 conference call. Presently, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star 1 on your phone. As a reminder, this call has been recorded. Now, I will turn the call over to Mr. Amrish Srivastava, Vice President and Investor Relations, you may begin.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Joining me today are Irving Tan, Chief Executive Officer, and Don Bennett, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on management's current assumptions and expectations. which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include expectations for our product portfolio, our business plans and performance, ongoing market trends, and our future financial results. We assume no obligations to update these statements. Please refer to our most recent financial report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC for more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. We will also make references to non-GAAP financial measures today. Reconciliations between the non-GAAP and comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the press release and other materials that are being posted in the investor relations section of our website at investor.wdc.com. With that, I will now turn the call over to Irving for introductory remarks.

Thanks, Abhresh. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm honored to be speaking with you for the first time as the CEO of Western Digital. It is a privilege to lead this exceptional organization I want to start by recognizing the outstanding work of our employees across the company, who managed the complex separation process over the last several months, while also continuing to drive the strong performance we are reporting today. Throughout that time, they remained deeply connected to our customers, continued pushing the boundaries of leading-edge innovation, and sustained a strong focus on our operational excellence. This combination of customer focus, innovation, and execution positions us well for the opportunities ahead. In the past month, we've also welcomed our new Chief Product Officer, Ahmed Shihab. Having held leadership positions at two large hyperscalers, Ahmed is a seasoned expert in cloud storage needs and requirements, making him the right person to lead our product strategy and engineering teams as we continue to drive innovation and deliver solutions that meet the evolving demands of our data-driven world. We are excited to have Acumet join Western Digital as its customer-centric perspective and deep industry knowledge, particularly with data centres, will be invaluable to us going forward. Let me now provide you with a few updates on our business. Since stepping into this role, I've been spending a great deal of time with our customers, employees, and the investment community. What's clear to me is that Western Digital has an incredibly strong foundation, a resilient business model, and incredible potential to benefit from the demand in the age of AI. Even in a world marked by geopolitical uncertainty and shifting trade dynamics, wanting remains constant, the exponential growth of data. From enterprise workloads to the explosion of AI-generated content, such as the millions of images and viral videos generated through AI, data generation is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. When it comes to storing data at scale, no technology rivals the cost efficiency and the reliability of HDDs. We continue to serve as the backbone of the world's data infrastructure. delivering unmatched value for mass storage needs. As we deliver our critical HDD technology to our customers, we are focused on continued innovation to provide the highest capacity drives with improved performance, energy efficiency, and lowest total cost of ownership. Our industry-leading 11 disk drives with capacities of up to 26TB CMR and 32TB Ultra-SMR are now ramping rapidly, with over 800,000 units shipped in the March quarter. We are also on track to ship well over a million units in the June quarter. This swift qualification and adoption cycle is a hallmark of our technology roadmap, demonstrating reliability, ease of implementation, and scalability with fastest time to value for our customers. On Hammer, we remain on track with respect to our milestones and roadmap that we communicated at our investor day in February. We are working closely on Hammer with two hyperscale customers and continue to receive encouraging ongoing feedback on our drives. Let me now turn to our quarterly results. For the third fiscal quarter, Western Digital delivered revenue of $2.3 billion, non-gap gross margin of 40.1%, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.36. Fee cash flow for the quarter was $436 million. At our investor day, we outlined the three pillars of our shareholder-friendly capital allocation approach. They are to reinvest in the business, reduce debt, and return cash to our shareholders. On April 14th, we redeemed $1.8 billion of our 2026 senior notes. Thus further strengthening our balance sheet, I am also pleased to announce that we are initiating a quarterly dividend of $0.10 per share in our fiscal Q4. These actions are underpinned by our strong belief in the strength and durability of our business. Don will cover this in greater detail in his remarks. Now turning to our outlook. First, I want to acknowledge the current environment which remains highly uncertain and volatile. driven in a large part by tariffs and global trade tensions. At Western Digital, we are addressing these challenges on two fronts. In the near term, we've established cross-functional teams to minimise disruption and mitigate the impact of tariffs on our customers and operations. At the same time, we're taking a strategic view, evaluating the longer-term implications of supply chain shifts to ensure we stay agile, resilient and are well positioned for the future. Though the broader environment has some uncertainty, demand from our hyperscale customers remains robust in a tight supply environment. We are thankful to our customers who increasingly recognise the complexity of the HDD supply chain and are partnering with us to provide visibility into their future needs. This collaboration enables us to plan more effectively and we now have long-term agreements to extend through the first half of calendar year 2026 with two of our largest customers. However, there are areas, such as in the enterprise and in certain parts of our distribution and retail business, where there could be more uncertainty with respect to demand, driven largely by the current tariff environment. Taking these factors into account, and looking ahead into the fiscal fourth quarter, we expect sequential revenue growth driven by sustained strength in data center demand. We continue to work closely with our customers to align with their long-term requirements while delivering the best possible total cost of ownership. Let me now turn the call over to Don, who will discuss our fiscal third quarter results and fiscal fourth quarter guidance in more detail.