Seagate has reported their financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2015 ending October 3, 2014. They presented some eye-catching results with a quarterly revenue of $3.785 billion, that’s an increase of 8.5%. The gross margin is down 0.2 points to 27.8% while the operating profit was $456 million and the net profit was $381 million, down 10.8%.
The company generated a cash flow of $602 million while paying dividends of $140 million to stockholders. At the same time, they repurchased approximately 3 million ordinary shares for $183 million. Cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments totaled approximately $2.2 billion at the end of the quarter.
“We achieved strong financial results in the first fiscal quarter, driven by consistent execution and better-than-anticipated market demand for our PC and Cloud storage products,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate’s chairman and chief executive officer. “We continue to improve our position in the evolving storage market by leveraging and investing in our core storage technology and expanding our product portfolio with Cloud systems and solutions and integrated flash technology. We remain confident in our cash flow generation and the opportunities ahead for Seagate as evidenced by our recently announced target annual dividend increase of 26% to $2.16.”
So it’s going very well for Seagate, we also have to remember that they now own LSI too. Seagate shipped a total of 59.5 million mechanical hard drives, an increase of 6.8% and a growth of 13.3% over two years. The 2.5-inch laptop hard drives are doing particularly well with 20% of the sales. SSHDs aren’t so popular among enthusiasts, but they are also doing very well with over 12 million drives sold so far.
Seagate didn’t announce any numbers regarding LSI/Sandforce, and it will be interesting to see where the traditional mechanical drive company takes this new acquisition.
Thanks to Seagate for providing us with this information
