80% Upside? Why Morgan Stanley Is Pounding the Table on Battered Seagate and Western Digital Stocks

Morgan Stanley expects strong earnings and solid guidance from both Western Digital and Seagate Technology. (Dreamstime)

Key Points

• Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring raises his price target on Seagate to $1,200 and cuts his Western Digital price target to $643.
• The analyst expects robust earnings results and guidance from both Seagate and Western Digital due to strengthening hard-drive market fundamentals.
• Shares of Seagate and Western Digital fell last week amid an artificial-intelligence selloff and concerns over growing competition from Toshiba.

Hard-drive makers Western Digital and Seagate Technology will soon be issuing earnings reports and Morgan Stanley expects robust results and guidance from each company as the hard-drive market resembles memory from a year ago.

Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring raised his price target on Seagate stock to $1,200 from $1,187 and cut his Western Digital price target to $643 from $676. The analyst also made Seagate a “top pick” for the firm’s information technology hardware industry.

Morgan Stanley has Overweight ratings on both stocks.

That new price target for Seagate represented 82% upside from the closing price on Monday of $660.81. Even with the price target reduction on Western Digital, Woodring also sees 83% upside for the stock based on the closing price of $352.21 from Monday.

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Western Digital stock declined 2.8% to $342.31 in premarket trading on Tuesday while Seagate stock fell 2% to $647.10. Both stocks tumbled last week as the artificial-intelligence trade suffered a brutal selloff.

Shares of Seagate declined more than 18% last week while Western Digital fell more than 16%.

The stocks have also come under pressure as concerns mount about growing competition from Toshiba after a report indicated the Japanese rival plans to double its hard-drive production capacity.

Both stocks were trading well below key technical moving averages as of Monday but Morgan Stanley sees an opportunity to be aggressive at the current share price levels.

“We see favorable tactical setups for both stocks, particularly WDC,” Woodring said in the research note.

The basis for this bullish view was that the hard-drive market has similarities to the memory market a year ago and that pricing is accelerating, according to Woodring.

“We see no evidence of irrational pricing or capacity behavior, and recent checks point to HDD fundamentals strengthening, meaning a stronger demand backdrop, a broadening customer base, and accelerating pricing,” Woodring said.

“We would still be aggressive buyers of STX/WDC into earnings,” the analyst added.

Western Digital reports earnings after the closing bell on Thursday while Seagate’s earnings are due Oct. 27.

If the market for hard drives is anything like what has happened to memory, that would be quite something. Soaring demand for memory from the AI boom has led to massive gains for memory stocks Micron Technology and Sandisk .

Write to Kit Norton at kit.norton@barrons.com

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