Stephen Milligan
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. After my opening remarks, Olivier Leonetti will provide additional commentary on our December quarter performance and our outlook for the March quarter.
I am pleased with our financial results in the December quarter. We achieved strong revenue, gross margin and earnings performance. We also generated significant cash flow from operations in the quarter, excluding the impact of the Seagate arbitration award.
The diversified nature of our business, together with ongoing secular growth in data and crisp execution by our HGST and WD subsidiaries, continued to enable us to consistently deliver strong financial performance. Market dynamics in the December quarter were in line with our expectations.
In our business, we saw a particular strength and demand for capacity enterprise and video surveillance hard drives and for Enterprise SSDs. As anticipated, there was a seasonal demand uptick for branded products.
We expect ongoing hyperscale cloud deployments, coupled with our expanding product portfolio and customer engagement model, to continue fueling our growth and capacity enterprise for the foreseeable future. Petabyte growth in this category is expected to remain strong. Our Flash Platform Solutions business, which includes our expanding portfolio of enterprise class SSDs, maintained its growth trajectory in the quarter, delivering revenue of $187 million.
The demand outlook for the March quarter reflects a normal seasonal decline with moderation in client, branded products and performance enterprise with stable demand in capacity enterprise. We believe overall supply and demand and associated inventory levels remain balanced.
I continue to be encouraged by the ongoing stabilization of the PC market where demand has been in line with our expectations. Furthermore, I am encouraged by the market's response to our strategic growth initiatives, which we believe position the company to thrive in the evolving data storage ecosystem.
We have strengthened our value proposition by enhancing our technical expertise, expanding our product portfolio and investing in our go-to-market capabilities. We will continue to prudently evaluate investment opportunities to advance these initiatives.
We gained traction in key markets during the December quarter. Our broad lineup of high-capacity hard drives, including those based on our proprietary HelioSeal platform continued to be embraced by both traditional enterprise and hyperscale data center customers. We continue to invest in high-growth vertical market applications. Specifically, we have seen strong customer acceptance of our WD Purple hard drives in the security surveillance market. We launched the 6-terabyte model in the December quarter that has been well received by customers. We expect strong ongoing growth in this space, given the rapid adoption of digital video cameras and security surveillance systems worldwide.
There continues to be strong growth momentum in branded with our portfolio of My Cloud solutions addressing both the consumer and pro-sumer markets. The My Cloud software and apps have now been downloaded by more than 4 million users worldwide.
We are engaged with customers and partners on our recently announced Active Archive platform. Proof-of-concept systems are up and running, and initial customer feedback has been positive. This new category of storage solution will feature high-density petascale capacities in a single rack, and deliver entirely new levels of storage efficiency and value. And as a reminder, we expect revenue growth from our Flash Platform's business to outpace that of the industry.
Before turning it over to Olivier, I would like thank and recognize our employees worldwide for helping to deliver a strong second quarter. Our consistent financial performance is a testament to the strength of our team, a well-diversified business, leading products and a customer-centric engagement model. Olivier?