WDC
Wall Street just hit the gas
Western Digital is having one of those days where the chart looks like it chugged three energy drinks. Morgan Stanley's Erik Woodring reaffirmed an Overweight rating and yanked his price target up from $488 to $650, which helped send WDC to fresh highs.
The bull case isn't just "numbers go up" hand-waving, either. Woodring said a week of management meetings and Asia checks made him more confident that Western Digital can keep outperforming thanks to:
- 30%+ year-over-year growth in nearline enterprise demand
- Improving pricing
- Expanding margins
- Better operating leverage
The Street is re-running the math
Woodring also boosted his FY27 and FY28 earnings estimates to $22.40 and $43.47, both well above consensus. On his math, the new target implies about 20x CY27 EPS of $32.29, and he even sees a path for the stock to roughly double over the next year if his bull-case pricing scenario plays out.
That’s a pretty aggressive reset, but it matches the mood in the stock: WDC was up 14.7% to $645.69 at the time of publication and was trading at a new 52-week high.
Why investors should care
This is where the story gets interesting. Western Digital isn’t just being treated like a cyclical hard-drive name anymore — the market is starting to price it like a company with a real multi-year earnings runway. The market loves that combo when it believes demand is durable and supply discipline is intact.
Big picture: when analysts start talking about pricing power, margins, and a long runway in the same breath, the stock can stay in beast mode longer than your inner skeptic expects.