And on the flash side of the business, the portfolio is also in great shape with both for product strategy and also the branding strategy. SanDisk, WD Black, these brands continue to perform extremely well. So we think it’s a great setup for both businesses going forward.
Krish Sankar: Got it, thanks for that David. Another quick follow-up, your peers spoke about the HAMR Technology getting like adopted next year, and your road map shows EPMR to extending to 32 plus terabyte,. I’m kind of curious how you think about HAMR and your road map in case they’ll catch up with C8?
David Goeckeler: Well, look we put a lot of optionality in our roadmap a number of years ago, so that we could extend the capacity points with things like OptiNAND, SMR, Ultra-SMR, EPMR, so that strategy is working very, very well. We’re leading the industry in capacity points. We expect to be able to drive this strategy into the 40 terabyte range on our drives. HAMR is in development, it’s going well, and we’ll be able to fold that into our roadmap at the appropriate time. But for now, we’ve got a great roadmap, we’ve got a market-leading roadmap, we’re leading the adoption of SMR into the cloud data center and we expect, you know, we have many more generations to go on our current roadmap and then we’ll move to HAMR at the appropriate time when it’s mature and we can build it at scale and it’ll be the next leg of growth into the future.
Krish Sankar: Thanks, David.
David Goeckeler: Thank you, Krish.
Operator: Our next question comes from Wamsi Mohan from Bank of America. Please go ahead with your question.
Wamsi Mohan: Hi, yes, thank you so much. Good morning. Back to the transaction, I guess, can you maybe talk a little bit about all the actions that you have taken that might be preventing some of the dissynergies that typically occur in terms of standard costs when there is separation of the business? Can you maybe A, address that? And B, on your comments on the roadmap, Ultra-SMR, EPMR, you have a lot of options. You’ve noted scaling up to 40 TV. Can you just talk about what the cost of that, how that would compare to, you know, your own future HAMR roadmap and give us some sense of how cost competitive you think these products would be? Thank you.
Wissam Jabre: Okay. So, on the first one, yes, I mean, Wamsi, I think you kind of laid it out there. We’ve been going through a whole series of actions that have set us up for this announcement. You know, it was really about execute the business better and give ourselves as much strategic optionality as possible. So as I talked about in the prepared remarks we’ve, you know, we separated ourselves in the business units on the product side that allows us to really get very focused on the portfolio and all the OpEx we spend on building our products, make sure we get the best return for it. I think that’s worked out well. We then did the same thing in operations. We’ve now divided those organizations around HDD and flash. So we’ve — and then we’ve optimized, taken out cost everywhere we can so that we can operate them independently and also have just the most efficient business possible.
As I said, we’ve focused on our balance sheet. So I think we’ve put ourselves in a very good position where we can go through this separation and the organization is as prepared as we possibly can be for it. We’ve also, as I said earlier, we’ve taken a lot of OpEx out of the business. So we’ve driven the OpEx down to a very efficient number. So we believe we can go through the separation and end up with two very well-structured companies that can execute very well. And they come out of the gate with market-leading portfolios on each side and into a recovering market. So we feel good about that. Cost of the portfolio look I mean as you continue we feel the roadmap we have in place, you know, we can produce ultra-SMR, EPMR, OptiNAND drives very high scale, very quickly, very high yields on all the products.
So we think the cost position is very advantageous. You see that in our results, you know, so you know when HAMR comes will fold that in and you know we want to get to the point where we have the same level of yields we have the same level of confidence as we do something like a 26-T drive that we just launched and now it’s the, you know, nearly half of our exabytes, a quarter or two in. And that’s how we think about launching new products. So you know, when we get there, I think that we’ll have that same kind of cost structure on HAMR, and we have a great, very, very strong position to drive very efficient, very high scale, very quickly, new drives for many generations on the technology that we’ve put in place over the last three or four years.
Wamsi Mohan: Thanks, Dave.
David Goeckeler: Thank you. Our next question comes from Sidney Ho from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead with your question.
