Western Digital’s Drive

When Charles Haggerty took the helm at Western Digital Corp. three years ago, many analysts wondered how quickly he would move to make the struggling company less dependent on the cut-throat computer disk drive business.

Since then, the Irvine-based company has concentrated exclusively on its disk drive business, tossed everything else overboard, and watched both its sales and stock price soar.

As it turned out, “it wasn’t the business they were in, it was their ability to compete in the business they were in,” said Roxane Googin, an analyst at Gruntal & Co. in Beverly Hills.

Western Digital’s stock price has been hovering at record levels for the past week, after a cross-country trip that Haggerty and others made to spread the word about Western Digital’s recent successes and to offer a glimpse of what’s coming up next.

Last month, Haggerty met with analysts in Rochester, Minn., where Western Digital is for the first time developing high performance disk drives designed to be used in servers--the powerful computers that support networks, including the fast-growing Internet. The drives are scheduled to be introduced later this year.

Haggerty followed that up with a trip to New York, where he told analysts and investors that the company is having an unusually strong summer both in terms of the number of orders coming in and the number of drives being shipped out.

Meanwhile, the $2.87-billion company continues to gain ground in the market for disk drives used in desktop computers. Western Digital’s share of that market is 22%, up from 16% two years ago, said company spokesman Robert Blair.

Western Digital’s momentum has made the company a bit of a Wall Street darling. The company’s stock closed the week at $34, more than double its price last fall.