Western Digital Corporation Case Study

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1: Introduction

Western Digital Corporation, commonly known as WD, is an American developer and manufacturer of digital data storage solutions based in Irvine, California. Changing market needs and attempting to seize marketing opportunities, WD spread its wings, establishing branches all over the world including America, Europe and Asia along with its subsidiaries HGST and other WD subsidiaries. This has made them to become a very strong and huge organization with thousands of employees across the world.

Their enormous expansion since founded in 1970, has given them a great advantage in this open market, to sustain as a pioneer in leading innovations and technological advancement in data storage devices but this was not achieved by acquiring high number of sales only. An organizations success is highly depends on its people. WD faced a great challenge as an organization that works in many nations with a large workforce. Understanding and overseeing assorted qualities or workforce diversity is not discretionary but a key business need.

WD responded to booming globalization in early 70’s by establishing their manufacturing plants in Malaysia and Thailand. These nations offered cheap skilled labor and lesser manufacturing costs compared to their earlier manufacturing plant in US. WD had one big challenge during this transition which is transferring their technology, manufacturing skills and the most essential part, WD’s culture, to this new environment. Improving their new workforce’s skill was the crucial part and WD was well aware of this situation.

The following chapters will discuss further on these two challenges faced by WD during their expansion to Asia. There were more difficulties and hurdles related to the challenges were faced by WD during that period. Concerns arise in terms of sociological issues, employee benefits and needs, and more. How WD handled these challenges? What are the techniques they used to solve these problems? Do they manage to find a permanent solution for it? Are they still facing these issues until now? Following chapters will emphasize and elaborate more on these concerns.

Part 2: Industry Background

In the early 21st century, the boom of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has lured many tech-giants into the market of storage media including Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Fujitsu, Intel, Buffalo and others. (Vault.com, n.d.)

By 2011, the number of manufacturers has both grown and shrunk in this segment of optical media storage due to advancement of technology leaving just five major companies handling bulk orders which are Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi GST, Toshiba and Fujitsu. Throughout that time period many companies has merge to sustain their operational margin in the traditional disk drives market. Maxtor and Samsung were gobbled by Seagate and IBM by Hitachi which was further wolf down by Western Digital leading to only 3 main players in this segment as Figure 1. (Forbes, 2015)

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Figure 1: HDD MARKET SHARE 2014

Currently, Western Digital Corporation is an industry leader when it comes to media based data storage devices. In recent years, media storage devices are facing great threat from fast emerging flash memory devices. Globalization has fed more fuel for flash storage as more companies are shifting to low cost manufacturing region such as China and Vietnam, which leads to price drop for these devices. Battle between flash storage and media storage are solely depends on its innovation to determine its winner. Efforts are being taken by both manufacturers to increase its storage capacity per device and lesser manufacturing cost.