Seagate Q4 Profit Drops, Sees Q1 Results Below View; Stock Down

(RTTNews) - Seagate Technology plc. (STX) reported that its net income for its fourth quarter dropped to $166 million or $0.64 from $983 million or $3.54 per share last year.

The company said that the latest-quarter was led by robust cloud and data center demand, which drove record exabyte shipments for nearline mass capacity drives and strongly contributed to the company's overall revenue and solid free cash flow generation.

However, continued economic uncertainty and COVID-19 related disruptions impacted demand in other key end markets including video and image applications, mission critical and consumer markets and also impacted profitability as it incurred higher logistics and labor costs which together weighed on its fourth quarter results, the company said.

STX closed Wednesday regular trading at $48.57, down $1.01 or 2.04%. In the after-hours trade, the stock further dropped $4.07 or 8.38%.

Non-GAAP net income per share was $1.20 compared to $0.95 in the prior year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report earnings of $1.29 per share for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Revenue for the quarter grew to $2.52 billion from $2.37 billion in the prior year. Analysts expected revenue of $2.61 billion for the quarter.

The company declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.65 per share, which will be payable on October 7, 2020 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on September 23, 2020.

Looking ahead for its first quarter 2021, the company expects non-GAAP earnings per share to be $0.85, plus or minus $0.15; revenue of $2.3 billion, plus or minus $200 million. Wall Street currently is looking for the first-quarter earnings of $1.27 per share on annual revenues of $2.59 billion.