Seagate Technology is a computer hardware company that engineers data storage technologies. The company produces hard disk drives and provides data recovery services for all enterprises around the world.
51 Reviews
- Good work/life balance - Most of the Fremont office is remote, except for engineering. Marketing comes in a few days a week. - Comp is decent but stock is pretty volatile, which makes RSU's unpredictable. - Benefits are pretty good. - Disk drive engineering and technology is very good. - Very good at high-volume manufacturing of a very complex electro-optical-mechanical device.
- The company is losing money. Revenue dropped 36.7% Y/Y. Things will likely be bad for another 9-12 months according to industry analysts at TrendFocus. Same thing with the other disk, DRAM and Flash companies (WDC, Toshiba, Kioxia, SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, etc). The commodity component market is pretty bad these days. AI is probably not the salvation that everyone hoping as most of it is being done in the cloud. - No bonuses while the company is hemorrhaging cash, obviously. - The company instituted a 12 month pay cut for most salaried employees ranging from 8% - 50%. - Many rounds of layoffs starting in Fall 2022. A big one in November 2022, Feb 2023, May 2023. - More layoffs recently (Fall 2023) including a 2x President's Club winner. Things are really not going well if you're laying off your best employees. - The disk drive business is in a slow decline as many people in the business are aware. Revenue was $10.8B in 2019, now in 2023 (FY) down to $7.3B. Some of the decline is cyclical due to depressed purchasing from CSP's as per the CEO on the last earnings call but long-term, Flash is slowly replacing disk (ie Pure Storage). This will only increase over time as the cost premium for Flash comes down. Not much that Seagate can do about this except for producing higher capacity drives at lower $/TB. However, this does not address the massive I/O performance advantage that flash has over disk for performance sensitive uses. This relegates disk drives to backup and archive use cases where cost is important, and performance is not. - Management is all-in on disk drives. The focus is on higher capacity disk drives using the HAMR technology. - Previous diversification plans like Lyve Cloud storage-as-a-service and CORTX object store have not been successful, and most of the staff were laid off or left. It is hard for a disk drive company to be successful at software and services competing with AWS. - A private equity fund (ValueAct Capital) is a major shareholder and on the board of directors. Seagate needs to keep the dividend at 4% to satisfy shareholders but is bleeding cash (FY23 NI of -$529M) due to losses (hence the layoffs). According to analysts, it's not clear if they can keep the dividend before the cash runs out and the business picks up again. If the dividend is cut, the stock will drop as revenue growth short-term will be slow.
The global solid state drive (SSD) market size reached US$ 37.6 Billion in 2021. By 2027, it will reach a value of US$ 95.51 Billion, growing at 15.60%
Marketreports.info has unveiled the addition of a new study titled Global Enterprise NAS Market, whi