Western Digital 2013 Annual Report Download - page 13

from small startup companies to multinational corporations, including Fusion I-O, Inc., Intel Corporation, Micron
Technology, Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., SanDisk Corporation, Seagate Technology LLC and Toshiba Corpo-
ration.
The storage industry is increasingly utilizing tiered architectures with hard drives and solid-state drives or solid
state hybrid drives to address an expanding set of use cases and applications. Hard drives are highly substitutable due
to the industry mandate of technical form, fit and function standards and we believe there are no substantial barriers
for existing competitors to offer competing products. Hard drive attributes include product quality and reliability,
storage capacity, unit price, product performance, production volume capabilities, delivery capability, leadership in
time-to-market, time-to-volume and time-to-quality, service and support and ease of doing business. The relative
importance of these factors varies by customer and market and we believe that we are generally competitive in all of
these factors. Semiconductor media or solid-state technology provides high performance attributes in some enterprise-
class applications and attractive functionality in consumer handheld applications requiring smaller form factors, lower
power and less storage capacity, such as smart phones and tablets. With advances in our own solid-state enterprise
business, coupled with recent actions to strengthen those resources through acquisitions, we believe we are positioned
to compete successfully in the enterprise-class solid-state segment of this market. Advances in magnetic, optical or
other data storage technologies could also result in competitive products for storing digital content with better per-
formance or lower cost per unit of capacity than our products. We monitor the advantages, disadvantages and
advances of the full array of storage technologies on an ongoing basis.
Business Strategy
Our focused business strategy is to be an industry-leading developer and manufacturer of innovative storage sol-
utions that enable people to create, manage, experience and preserve digital content. We strive to achieve our business
strategy through the following elements:
‰relentless focus on operational excellence in all aspects of our business;
‰providing a full portfolio of compelling, high quality storage products with effective technology deployment,
high efficiency, flexibility and speed;
‰developing collaborative engineering relationships with customers that create value by solving their data
management needs through innovative solutions; and
‰strategically aligning our investments in profitable and growing markets such as mobility, solid-state and
cloud computing.
We believe our strategy provides the following benefits:
‰continued diversification of our storage product portfolio away from our historical reliance on PCs and entry
into additional growing adjacent markets;
‰distinguishes us in the dynamic and competitive storage industry;
‰allows us to achieve consistent financial performance, including strong returns on invested capital and cash
generation, thereby enabling efficient allocation of capital to shareholders and strategic investments in
innovation; and
‰creates compelling value for our customers and growth opportunities for our suppliers, employees, and share-
holders.
Products and Solutions
We offer a broad line of storage products and solutions to meet the evolving storage needs of our end users. Our
hard drives currently include 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, capacities ranging from 30 gigabytes (“GB”) to 4
terabytes (“TB”), nominal rotation speeds up to 15,000 revolutions per minute (“RPM”), and interfaces such as Fibre
Channel, Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (“SATA”) and SAS. Our solid-state drives currently include 2.5-
inch, mSATA, MO-297 and CompactFlash form factors, capacities ranging from 128 MB to 400 GB, and interfaces
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