Even though the shares have been among the top performers in the market, CNBC’s Jim Cramer still believes that Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC) got lucky. The stock is up by 644% over the past year and by 173% year-to-date. Cramer’s sentiment about Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC) repeats his earlier claims about the firm. For instance, in May, he remarked that “It’s a memory stock that trades at 46 times earnings. That seems too rich to me.” Earlier, in February, the CNBC TV host outlined that even though firms such as the computer storage company had seen impressive valuations, their inability to forecast customer demand, coupled with a light capacity increase, wasn’t “enough to alleviate the tightness anytime soon.” In fact, Cramer went as far as to add that the hesitance had “done real damage to their customer base, companies like Apple.” In his morning appearance on Tuesday, he compared Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC) to Micron and Apple:
“Versus Western Digital. I mean look, I owned 4.9% of Western Digital at one point. I got to tell you, it’s not a great company. It is not a NVIDIA. It is not a Micron, it is an also ran company that got lucky. Now you could say wait a second, it’s better to be lucky than Apple, Apple did not spend 200 billion on AI and yet we all love Apple. But Western Digital, it’s an okay company. . .do you want to put bet the farm on Western Digital or would you rather put it on Jamie Dimon?”
Cramer choosing to compare Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC) with Micron is important due to the nature of their products. While Western Digital manufactures storage devices, Micron is one of the three companies globally that are capable of making high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips which gives it a key competitive edge when it comes to firms supplying the hardware to power AI data centers.
At the close of April, Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC) reported its fiscal third quarter earnings. The firm posted $3.34 billion in revenue and $2.72 in earnings per share to beat analyst estimates of $3.25 billion and $2.39. As part of the release, Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC) explained that its cloud business accounted for 89% of its total revenue to signal strong demand from AI products.
Morgan Stanley discussed Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC)’s shares on June 15th as it raised the share price target to $650 from $488 and kept an Overweight rating on the shares. The bank outlined that it expected hard disk drive demand to grow between 40% to 50% annually and outpace supply growth of 30% to 35% as AI inference and cloud computing growth require more storage.
