Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ:STX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Wamsi Mohan: Thank you so much.

Operator: The next question comes from Timothy Arcuri with UBS. Please go ahead.

Timothy Arcuri: Thanks a lot. I also had a question on pricing and sort of how you think about it versus market share. We’ve heard examples of you raising prices 10% to 15%. It’s obviously a little bit counterintuitive and such a soft market. So I guess two questions. One, how are customers reacting to that? And then also, are you willing to lose share as you kind of look out? Is there like a line in the sand on share that you’re going to draw where, you wouldn’t raise pricing if you lost share? Or are you willing to lose share to get pricing reset to a more susceptible level? Thanks.

Dave Mosley: Yes. Thanks, Tim. So, yes, you are right. It’s a weak demand environment. But I think also there’s, generally speaking, the whole industry is underwater. So I mean, we have to make sure we protect ourselves, we protect the supply base as we talked about earlier. And it’s different in different products across the market obviously – the different markets obviously. How is being accepted? There’s – you can imagine the entire monopoly of different responses. Some people are worried about supply longer term. They do believe that supply will be short and demand will come back. And so – and especially with the long, long lead times that there are on mass capacity products right now, I think it’s something that people are very much in tune with.

And so it’s forcing good discussions. There’s other people for various reasons that need to make tactical procurement decisions and they’ll take whatever deals are out in front of them. And I get that. I mean, that happens from time to time in the business. That’s one of the big reasons why we don’t want to overbuild, we want to make sure, we hold as much as we possibly can. And as we continue to play this forward, I think we’ll see and adjust accordingly to make sure that we defend our products. I think the optimism for us is that we can actually go through the product transitions, get to the higher capacity points, provide a better TCO proposition, get components out of the supply chains and so on. And then, we didn’t dilute or extend the problem any by overbuilding or dilute the problem by continuing to overbuild and then lowering price.

And that’s what we have to hold onto.

Operator: The next question comes from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Erik Woodring: Awesome guys. Thanks for taking my question. Now, Dave, I just wanted to ask if you could flesh out the comment you made in your prepared remarks about the timing of a demand recovery being delayed by AI investments. Just in the context of you talking about market conditions weighing on demand through December. Are you telling us we shouldn’t expect sequential growth in capacity shift until calendar 2024? Just if you could help us connect some of these dots that’d be great. Thank you very much.

Dave Mosley: Thanks, Erik. Yes, and I think I mentioned in one of the earlier comments that it’ll be slight capacity growth, but the way I read through most of the results that have already – are already coming through in the cloud, and in most of my conversations as well, I think it’s fairly consistent that there’s priorities being put on data center infrastructure, new data center build out, power infrastructure that was already kind of – it was – things were biased that way instead of mass capacity stores, the mass capacity being something that would come later. And we all know about the great new capabilities that there are in some of the compute technologies and how those new technologies are being applied in new applications.