Seagate Just Posted Record Earnings, and This Time the Stock Actually Went Up

Seagate reported its fiscal Q4 and full-year 2026 results on August 14, and the numbers landed very differently than Western Digital's earnings did a few weeks earlier. Where WD's stock dropped despite a record quarter, Seagate's shares jumped roughly 5.7% on the day, and multiple Wall Street firms pushed their price targets above $1,000. For a company that spent 2023 fighting off bankruptcy talk, that is a dramatic turnaround, and it says a lot about where hard drive prices in the UAE and everywhere else are headed next.

The Numbers

Seagate's fiscal 2026 revenue surged 34% year over year to $12.2 billion, with a record $3.1 billion in free cash flow. Non-GAAP earnings per share beat Wall Street estimates for the quarter, and the company cut $1.4 billion in debt over the year while resuming shareholder returns after several lean years. For its next quarter, Seagate guided to $4.0-4.2 billion in revenue and $7.10-7.50 in EPS, well ahead of what analysts had penciled in. Firms including Wedbush, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Wells Fargo all raised their price targets on the stock following the report, several above the $1,000 mark, a level that would have sounded absurd for Seagate stock just two years ago.

What's Driving It

The story behind the numbers is the same one reshaping the entire storage market this year: AI and cloud data centers are buying hard drives faster than manufacturers can make them. Seagate's Mozaic platform, built around HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, is central to that demand, letting the company pack more capacity onto fewer platters for hyperscale customers racing to build out AI storage infrastructure. That same platform underpins the 32TB drives Seagate brought to market earlier this year. That demand has left nearline and enterprise HDD supply tight industry-wide, giving Seagate more pricing power than it has had in years, and giving the company far more room to negotiate on price with the data center operators buying drives by the thousand.

What This Means for Florence Trading Customers

Florence Trading carries Seagate's drives for UAE buyers building out NAS boxes, DVR systems, and backup storage, including the 32TB drives covered here last month. Tight supply and strong pricing power at the manufacturer level rarely stay contained to the enterprise segment for long, and Seagate is not the only drive maker seeing it: Western Digital reported a similar supply crunch in its own recent quarter. If Seagate and its rivals are commanding higher prices from data center customers and getting rewarded for it on Wall Street, retail HDD pricing in the UAE is more likely to hold steady or creep upward than to soften anytime soon. Anyone planning a storage upgrade or NAS build in the coming months may want to treat current pricing as the better end of the range rather than wait for a discount, particularly on higher-capacity drives where demand from data centers overlaps most directly with what home and small business NAS builders are buying.

Browse Florence Trading's current Seagate lineup at the Seagate collection.