Stephen D. Milligan - Western Digital Corp.
Management
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. With me today are Mike Cordano, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Mark Long, Chief Financial Officer. After my opening remarks, Mike will provide a summary of recent business highlights and Mark will cover the fiscal first quarter results and wrap-up with our guidance for the fiscal second quarter. I'm pleased with our performance in the September quarter, our first full quarter as an integrated company following the SanDisk acquisition in May. We reported revenue of $4.7 billion, non-GAAP gross margins of 34%, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.18, exceeding our revised guidance in each category. We continued to experience strong demand throughout the September quarter for both hard drive and flash-based products from all categories of customers, largely driven by cloud and mobility based applications, as well as better than expected PC demand and our own outperformance in certain categories. These trends are expected to continue in the December quarter. We are delivering our financial performance through continued strong execution by the newly-combined Western Digital team, demonstrating the power of our broad-based and unique platform. The platform includes an unparalleled breadth of storage product offerings, expanded vertical integration and go-to-market capabilities, an increasing level of customer intimacy and a proven ability to innovate and sustain leadership across multiple storage technologies. We have made significant progress establishing this strategic platform by combining and leveraging the collective strengths and resources of legacy HGST, SanDisk and WD. Our platform is aligned with our vision of the continued rapid growth of data and its increasing importance in our everyday lives. The power and promise of data is undeniable. It is creating a world that's more predictive, more productive and more personal, enabling smarter decisions, breakthrough discoveries and deeper connections. The Western Digital platform is at the core of enabling the possibilities of data. It differentiates us from our competitors and we believe it will drive our company to a future of growth and long-term industry leadership. We are already seeing the benefits of the platform in our differentiated financial results and outlook. I am very pleased that we have achieved this financial performance, while, at the same time, successfully executing on two top priorities, namely, the integrations of HGST, SanDisk and WD, and the transition to next-generation NAND technology. Integration of the three companies is proceeding very well, and our synergy achievements are on track. I'm also pleased to note that our transition to 3D NAND technology continues to progress as planned and we will begin a significant commercial ramp of our second-generation 3D NAND with 64 layers in the first half of calendar 2017, as previously announced. Mike Cordano will now report on our business highlights in the September quarter.