Seagate plans to cut 3,000 jobs to save costs

Mechanical hard disk buy people are indeed less and less, Seagate's new financial report again thunder, it is not unexpected.

Seagate today announced its fiscal 2023 first quarter (Q1) results. Seagate reported revenues of $2.035 billion (GAAP) in the first quarter of 2023 and $3.115 billion (GAAP) in the first quarter of 2022. Operating margins plummeted from 18.8% to 5.3%.

Seagate said the plan included cutting about 3,000 jobs -- about 8 percent of its global workforce -- and other cost-saving measures.

The announcement follows Seagate CEO David Mosley's statement that the company's business has been affected by a series of dynamic market conditions following its fiscal year 22 Q4 results in July, which have put pressure on inventory and supply chain, as well as international and domestic cloud customers becoming more cautious about purchasing behavior. These changes will not only affect Seagate's top line, but also Seagate's bottom line, resulting in a significant earnings miss of $1.20 per share. In response, Seagate is also making adjustments, including reducing production, reducing expense costs, and slowing investment plans through 2023. According to Seagate's July earnings report, revenue for the quarter was $2.63 billion, below analyst expectations of $2.8 billion. Revenue was $3.01 billion, down 12.6% from the same period last year, while profit was $276 million, down 42% from $482 million.

The official shipment figures are long gone, but we can evaluate the shipments from the financial results. The total capacity of the hard drives shipped in Q4 was 154.6 exabytes, and the average hard drive capacity was 7.8TB. The calculation shows that only 19.82 million hard drives were shipped in Q4, compared with 28.2 million in the same period last year. That's nearly 10 million fewer.