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Seagate replaces current CEO with a previous CEO

Brian White — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:58:00 EST

Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) has told CEO William Watkins to hit the road, and has brought in Chairman and former CEO Stephen Luczo to replace him. Watkins, one of the funniest and most candid CEOs on the planet, has been the operational wizard behind Seagate's manufacturing turnaround in the last five years while he also cut Seagate's global workforce by half as the company became leaner and more aggressive. It also swallowed competitor Maxtor a few years ago, but has never been able to squash competitor Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC), which continues to eat its lunch at every opportunity.

Still, Seagate's quarterly results on January 21st may show that the world's largest disk drive maker has fallen hard on the back of consumer spending slowdowns and reduced orders from its largest OEM and distribution partners. Seagate President and COO David Wickersham also abruptly resigned yesterday, which makes us all wonder just what kind of internal turmoil there was at the top of Seagate's management ranks.

Luczo, the banker who took Seagate private in 2000 with a group of investors only to take it public again a few years later with a fat check in his pocket, isn't a technologist. He's not an operational guy, nor a manufacturing guy. He is a finance guy who will no doubt have to turn Seagate's fortunes around once again to prop up its flagging stock price, which has plummeted from over $28 just over year ago to less than $5 today.

Seagate replaces current CEO with a previous CEO originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seagate's (STX) Watkins sees bright future for hard drive industry

Brian White — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:11:00 EST

Filed under: Good news, Industry, Stocks to Buy

Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) has had an interesting seven years. The company was taken private by a group of investment firms led by Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group and then returned to the public markets a mere two years later for some odd reason. Wait: that reason was to give a payoff to the investors, as going off the market for 24 months gave the global company a chance to sneer at Wall Street's quarterly, paranoid expectations and focus on long-term strategy. The hard drive company you may have rarely heard of, though, is recording billions in revenue each quarter and is in fine shape financially. CEO Bill Watkins trumpets this fact all the time, but the Street rarely listens.

So, with Watkins alluding to $3 billion quarters in the near future and growing profits these days, is the market listening? Maybe not yet, but maybe your portfolio should. The never-slowing demand for storage is everywhere these days, hiding in plain site. Have a full-size iPod, Tivo box or other DVR, Xbox 360 or a computer in the home? Each one of those probably has some kind of hard drive in size, and according to Watkins, more consumers are buying all that storage than businesses these days. We have an insatiable need to store movies, music, files, taxes and everything else digitally, so this makes sense.

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Seagate's (STX) Watkins sees bright future for hard drive industry originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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