HEXUS.sharewatch: Lean times for hard drive makers

In our last HEXUS.sharewatch we anticipated the quartly earnings announcements of, among others, Apple and Western Digital (WD).

Both of these companies shared the same fate: they announced decent results but lowered their outlook for later in the year. As a consequence both companies suffered drops in their share prices: Apple's by ten percent and WD's by eight percent.

A look at WD's biggest competitor in the hard disk drive (HDD) market - Seagate - reveals no profound movement last week, but over the course of the last month or so there has been a big drop. On 6th June the price of Seagate shares was $22.27, at close of trading last week they were $14.97. That's a drop of nearly a third.

WD hasn't done too well in that period either: $30.94 from $38.93, a drop of a fifth. However, on 25th April the price was $28.41 so it seems to have come down from a June peak.

The Seagate drop-off appears to be due to poor execution in some areas. CEO Bill Watkins said as much when Seagate announce below-expectation earnings a couple of weeks ago. "Were it not for some product execution issues in the notebook and nearline markets, we believe we would have delivered an even stronger quarter and year, with improved share positions," he said.

Elsewhere, on our regular list, the biggest drops last week were suffered by AMD - again - and Yahoo! as the prospect of being bought by Microsoft diminished after it compromised with Carl Icahn.

There wasn't a lot of dramatic change elsewhere although it's worth noting that distributors, led by Ingram Micro, generally out performed the rest of the list and the tech-heavy NASDAQ out performed the Dow Jones.

This week is a big one for the games industry as Electronic Arts and Activision and Sony all report. We'll also see how Symantec and Motorola are doing.

*All prices are those at close of trading on the date specified, except 3/7/08 when we quoted prices and market caps at 15:00 UK time, 10:00 US eastern time.