Seagate’s earnings report was released today, and it was revealed that during the most recent quarter, they had a net loss of $496 million. That’s a lot! Of course, the fact is most companies are showing enormous drops in revenue, and are weathering it variously well depending on their volume and incidental costs like restructuring, acquisitions and so on. I’d be more worried about their actual hard drives than their business performance if I were you. Billion dollar multinational corporations don’t usually just seize up and die — unlike Seagate’s recent 1TB and 1.5TB hard drives.
This quarter is much different from last quarter, which was no great shakes but showed stronger sales and a nearly break-even situation. Seagate also had a few one-off costs like a tax reassessment of some kind, which cost them over a quarter-billion dollars. That doesn’t happen every quarter. So despite being hammered along with everyone else, and having a famously faulty product on the market at the moment, I’d say Seagate is actually relatively healthy. They blame the same closet full of bogeymen as the other companies, and that’s probably accurate.
Read the whole report here, it’s way too long to paste in.