Business Description

Western Digital was founded in 1970 and is a Standard & Poor’s 500 (“S&P 500”) company headquartered in San Jose, California. We are a leading developer, manufacturer, and provider of data storage devices and solutions based on hard disk drive (“HDD”) technology. HDDs are critical components in the worldwide data infrastructure market, powering the AI-driven digital economy. HDDs provide reliable, cost-effective, high-capacity storage needs for a wide range of applications, ranging from cloud data centers, enterprise storage systems, edge computing, and smart video to client and consumer devices. At Western Digital, we believe that data storage provides the strategic foundation for the AI-driven data economy. We focus on designing and building data storage solutions that are intelligent, efficient, and reliable. We execute on this mission through rigorous scientific research, engineering excellence, and deep customer collaboration, so that each product advancement provides value for our customers and shareholders. With much of the world’s data stored on Western Digital products, our innovation helps drive the global storage technology ecosystem, anchored in the cloud, and extending from consumer devices to the edge. Our broad portfolio of technology and products, sold under the Western Digital® and WD® brands, addresses our customers’ storage needs through multiple end markets: “Cloud,” “Client” and “Consumer”. Cloud . Cloud represents our largest and fastest growing end market comprised primarily of products for public or private cloud environments and enterprise customers. We enable cloud, Internet and social media infrastructure players to build more powerful, cost-effective and efficient data centers. We provide the Cloud end market with an array of high-capacity enterprise HDDs. Our high-capacity enterprise HDDs address growing storage demands with high reliability, easy scalability, and lower time to value for our customers — all while delivering a low total cost of ownership for cloud data center and smart video system markets. These drives are primarily for use in data storage systems, in tiered storage models and where data must be stored reliably for years. Client . Through the Client end market, we provide our original equipment manufacturer (“OEM”) and channel customers a broad array of high-performance HDD solutions across desktop and notebooks. Our products are designed for use in devices requiring high performance, reliability and capacity with various attributes such as low cost per gigabyte, quiet acoustics, and low power consumption. Consumer . We have also built strong consumer brand recognition with tools to help individuals manage vast libraries of personal content and to push the limits of what is possible for storage. We serve the Consumer end market with a portfolio of HDD external storage products that we offer globally through our retail and channel partners. Industry We operate in the data storage industry. The ability to access, store and share data from anywhere on any device is increasingly important to our customers and end users. From the intelligent edge to the cloud, data storage is not just foundational to AI, but also a fundamental component underpinning global technology architecture. Our strengths in innovation, areal density and cost leadership provide a foundation upon which we are solidifying our position as an essential building block of the AI-driven data economy. We believe there is tremendous market opportunity created by the rapid global adoption of technology built with cloud infrastructure, connected intelligent devices, and high-performance networks. The increase in computing complexity and advancements in AI, along with growth in cloud computing applications, connected mobile devices and Internet-connected products and edge devices is driving rapid growth in the volume of digital content to be stored and used. While this growth has led to the creation of several form factors for data storage and an increasing use of a tiered architecture approach, HDDs occupy a unique place in the market by providing an economical means to create, store and utilize an increasing amount of data in the age of AI.…