Western Digital 1997 Annual Report Download - page 4

To Our Shareholders:
Fiscal 1997 was Western Digital’s best year ever. The Company produced record
unit volume, revenues, net income and earnings per share as well as record
shareholders’ equity.
As the 1997 fiscal year marked Western Digital’s fifth year with present manage-
ment, it seems appropriate not only to review the year’s results but also to
summarize where we have taken the Company since 1992. This has been a time
of dramatic change that positioned Western Digital as a major player in the
worldwide market for hard drives, earned us a place among the Fortune 500
companies and, in 1996, gained recognition for Western Digital as the number
one company on that list in total return to shareholders.
In September of 1992, our Personal Storage Division launched its “platform
strategy,” which was the precursor of our “asset management strategy” — the
fundamental ingredient in our financial success. We succeeded in establishing
the Western Digital brand name while shedding assets that were not “core” to
our hard drive business. We divested unrelated businesses such as graphics
acceleration, battery chargers, SCSI adapter boards and fibre channel products,
and in late 1995 we formed our Enterprise Storage Group from scratch.
ESG has been a great and early success. This new operation brought its first
products to market in a record 21 months, and became profitable in its first
quarter of volume operation. This group is now responsible for approximately
1,200 people in its Rochester, Minnesota headquarters and in its Tuas, Singapore
production facility.
...a full-line hard drive supplier to the world’s leading computer makers.