Western Digital’s Retooling Pays Off

Riding a surge of demand for its computer disk drives after shedding other business lines in recent years, Western Digital Corp. on Wednesday reported record revenue and a 295% increase in net income for its first fiscal quarter ended Sept. 28.

The company posted a profit of $32.9 million, or 70 cents per share, compared with net income of $8.3 million, or 16 cents per share, in the comparable quarter a year earlier. Sales totaled $883 million in the first quarter, compared with $558 million a year ago.

Chief Executive Chuck Haggerty called the first quarter “one of the finest in the history of Western Digital,” a company that has flirted with financial disaster at various times in its 26-year history.

Haggerty, a former IBM executive who has reshaped Western Digital to concentrate exclusively on the disk drive market, said the results reflected strong demand for the company’s products for high-performance PCs. The company’s 1.2- and 1.6-gigabyte drives have been particularly popular with PC manufacturers.

Haggerty also said the company in the first quarter began shipping units from its new line of drives designed for use in servers--the powerful computers used in corporate networks and the Internet.

The company announced its earnings after the New York Stock Exchange had closed for the day. In later trading on other exchanges, Western Digital’s stock hit a record high of $48 per share, up $3.375. At this time last year, Western Digital stock was trading at about $15 per share.