WDC is a ticker symbol for the shares of Western Digital Corporation traded on the NYSE. Currency: USD. Western Digital’s index membership is NASDAQ-GS and S&P 500.

Western Digital Corp is the world’s leading manufacturer of computer hardware. The concern’s brand names are WD and Western Digital. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. It has factories in Malaysia and Thailand, engineering units in California, and sales offices in most parts of the world.

History of development

Western Digital (WDC) was founded in 1970 by former Motorola employee Alvin B. Phillips. The original name is General Digital.

Throughout the first half of the 1970s, the company was manufacturing chips for electronic calculators under the new name Western Digital. In the early 1980s, WD started to produce controllers for hard drives.

In 1983, WD won the contract to provide IBM with controllers for the PC/AT, making the WD1003 chip the basis for the ATA interface.

In 1986, the company acquired Paradise Systems Inc, the leading developer of video controllers for IBM PC compatibles, and started to produce WDC graphics cards.

In 1986, WD purchased the manufacturer of SCSI controller chips for disk and tape devices.

In 1987, the corporation acquired Faraday Electronics, a manufacturer of core logic chipsets.

In 1991, WD introduced a series of hard drives called Caviar. Amid the successful sales of these drives, the company started to sell some of its divisions.

In 1998, the firm gained access to IBM technologies and factories.

In 1999, WD introduced the Expert line of drives, which helped it regain respect among users and forced the company to boost its hard drive production.

In 2003, following the purchase of Read-Rite Corporation, a manufacturer of magnetic recording heads, WD offered the world's first Serial ATA HDD (SATA) hard drive interface.

In 2009, the acquisition of Siliconsystems allowed the company to enter the solid-state drive market.

In 2011-2012, Western Digital purchased Hitachi for $4.3 billion to become the largest hard drive manufacturer in the world.

In 2016, WD acquired SanDisk, the largest manufacturer of flash memory products.

Today, any memory storage device - from virtual space and modern data centers to mobile sensors and personal devices - uses Western Digital Corporation’s technologies.

Revenue, equity, achievements

WD describes itself as a company that has long been at the forefront of changing innovations - from the invention of the first hard drives to the latest developments in the 3D NAND technology (multilevel flash memory).

Western Digital Corp is engaged in the development, production, marketing, and sale of the following product categories:

Client Devices - mobile, desktop, gaming and digital video, hard drives, solid state drives (SSD), embedded products, and wafers;
Datacenter Devices and Solutions - enterprise hard disk drives (HDD), enterprise solid state drives, datacenter software;
Client Solutions - hard drive content solutions and flash content solutions.

WDC also generates license and royalty revenue from IP (intellectual property), which is included in each of these three categories.

Western Digital's total revenue amounted to $19.09 billion in 2017, $20.65 billion in 2018, $16.57 billion in 2019, and $16.74 billion in 2020.

The company’s total equity is $9.97 billion. It has $26.37 billion in total assets and 61,800 employees (approximate data as of 2019).

In 2016, its capitalization was $19 billion, $24 billion in 2017, $11 billion in 2018, $19 billion in 2019, and $17 billion in 2020. Market capitalization is $20,600,340,147.