Seagate Benefits from Cloud Adoption of HDDs, but Lacks a Moat

Seagate is a leading designer and manufacturer of hard disk drives, or HDDs, used for data storage in consumer and enterprise applications. We think Seagate is successfully transitioning its portfolio to focus on mass-capacity drives for cloud providers and enterprises as consumer applications for legacy HDDs switch to faster flash-based solid-state drives. We expect continued demand for mass-capacity drives over the next five years as enterprises look to capture more data and use a multitier storage approach, implementing both mass-capacity HDDs and smaller enterprise-grade SSDs as complements in data centers. Seagate has consistently driven costs down for its mass-capacity HDDs by advancing to larger capacities, and we think it will continue to do so by leveraging new technologies like heat-assisted magnetic recording.