That single comment dragged down the whole memory group, pulling Micron (MU), Western Digital (WDC), and SanDisk (SNDK) lower with it.<\/p>\n
It leaves the stock with one debate it cannot dodge, and a high-stakes earnings report waiting just over the horizon.<\/p>\n Photo by SOPA Images on Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Seagate shares closed Friday at $795.47<\/strong>, within striking distance of their all-time high.<\/p>\n Then Monday hit. The stock dropped as much as 7.5% intraday<\/strong>, touching a low near $723<\/strong> before steadying, according to Investing.com.<\/p>\n It clawed back some ground by midweek, closing Wednesday at $751.07<\/strong>, up 2.42%<\/strong> on the day.<\/p>\n Add it up, and STX sits roughly 6%<\/strong> below its pre-warning level, and about 10%<\/strong> under the $834.01<\/strong> record close it set on May 11<\/strong>.<\/p>\n More memory and AI stocks:<\/strong><\/p>\n The selling spread fast. Western Digital and SanDisk both fell alongside Seagate, with Western Digital trading 4.5% lower<\/strong> and SanDisk down 2.5%<\/strong> at one point.<\/p>\n When one storage CEO says he can’t build fast enough, the market reads it as a sector-wide ceiling.<\/p>\n Here is the part that spooked investors<\/strong>. Mosley explained that Seagate’s recording head wafers now carry lead times of<\/strong>more than nine months<\/strong>, with finished drives taking another quarter on top of that, Yahoo Finance reported.<\/p>\n A recording head wafer is the precision component that lets a drive read and write data, and it sits at the very start of a long build cycle.<\/p>\n Related: Seagate adds $15B in market cap on surprise news<\/strong><\/p>\n So the company runs a build-to-order model<\/strong>, giving it visibility only four to five quarters out.<\/p>\n “We want to keep that four or five quarters of visibility very, very solid,” Mosley said, according to CNBC. “But the demand is significantly higher than that.”<\/p>\n Diverting engineers to spin up new factories, he argued, would slow the pace of technology improvement that actually drives Seagate’s margins.<\/p>\n While Mosley was simply making an honest comment<\/strong>, investors heard a leader admit that his company cannot scale fast enough<\/strong> to capture the AI buildout in front of it.<\/p>\n This is the question now hanging over the stock: is Seagate’s AI-storage boom supply-constrained or demand-constrained?<\/strong><\/p>\n The distinction matters more than it sounds, because each path leads somewhere very different for the share price.<\/p>\n If growth is capped by how many drives Seagate can physically make<\/strong>, the upside has a ceiling that no amount of demand can lift.<\/p>\n If the constraint is genuine scarcity against runaway demand<\/strong>, then Seagate holds rare pricing power, and the bears are early.<\/p>\n Management has handed both camps ammunition. Nearline capacity<\/strong>, the high-capacity drives sold straight into cloud data centers, is almost fully allocated through calendar 2027, with customers already engaging on 2028 supply, Yahoo Finance notes.<\/p>\n That kind of forward visibility is rare for a hardware company. Whether you read it as a wall or a moat depends entirely on which thesis you already hold.<\/p>\n Start with valuation, because that is where the skeptics live.<\/p>\n STX trades around 69 to 70 times trailing earnings after a run that saw the stock climb more than 600% <\/strong>over the past year.<\/p>\n That price leaves almost no margin for error. A single soft quarter, a delayed product ramp, or a hint of softening cloud capex could trigger a sharp repricing.<\/p>\n The memory sector also has a history here. It has been burned by overcapacity before, with brutal price wars and margin damage that took years to repair.<\/p>\n UBS captures the caution. According to TipRanks, the firm raised its target to $545 from $515 but kept a Neutral rating, warning the market may already price in the structural improvements.<\/p>\n There is also the substitution risk<\/strong>. If solid-state drives encroach on nearline workloads, today’s pricing power could fade faster than the bulls expect.<\/p>\n The other side reads the same facts and sees strength.<\/p>\n Citi analyst Asiya Merchant points to “sustained robust demand” and a tight supply backdrop, framing the lead-time problem as proof of how badly customers want Seagate’s drives<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The fundamentals back the optimism<\/strong>. Fiscal Q3 2026 revenue rose 44% year over year to $3.11 billion, with record non-GAAP gross margins of 47%.<\/p>\n Management raised its medium-term revenue growth target to at least 20% a year, up from a previous low-to-mid-teens estimate, per Seeking Alpha.<\/p>\n The price targets reflect the conviction:<\/p>\n For long-term holders, scarcity locked in by contract and underpinned by AI capex looks more like durable pricing power than a growth ceiling.<\/p>\n A blowout quarter is already in the rearview. The next real test comes when Seagate reports fiscal fourth-quarter results<\/strong>, the close of its June fiscal year, expected in late July, per MarketBeat.<\/p>\n Management has already set a high bar. The company guided to fiscal Q4 revenue<\/strong> of $3.45 billion<\/strong>, plus or minus $100 million<\/strong>, and non-GAAP EPS of $5.00<\/strong>, plus or minus $0.20<\/strong>, per its SEC filing.<\/p>\n That midpoint implies revenue growth of about 41% year over year<\/strong>, so anything short of it would hand the bears their proof point.<\/p>\n Here is what will actually move the stock when those numbers land:<\/p>\n If management can put numbers behind “demand is significantly higher” than supply, the bull case strengthens<\/strong>. Vague reassurance will not be enough at this valuation.<\/p>\n For anyone weighing STX, the practical takeaway is about position sizing and patience, not bravado.<\/p>\n The stock is volatile by nature, with 44 moves greater than 5%<\/strong> over the past year. A 6% slide<\/strong> on a CEO comment is normal turbulence for this ticker, not necessarily a thesis-breaker.<\/p>\n If you already own it, the fiscal Q4 report will be a cleaner read than this week’s price swings. Wait for the numbers and the demand commentary before adding or trimming.<\/p>\n If you are looking to start a position, the valuation argues for caution<\/strong>. Buying a stock priced near perfection means you inherit all the downside of any stumble<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The honest framing<\/strong>: Seagate’s lead-time problem can be bullish or bearish, and the next earnings call is where management has to tell investors which one it is.<\/p>\n Related: Seagate CEO sends a bold message on AI and data storage<\/strong><\/p>\n #Seagate #stock #price #falls #CEO039s #rattling #warning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A throwaway line from a CEO rarely moves an entire sector in a single afternoon. Dave Mosley managed it on Monday. Speaking at the JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[246],"tags":[5619,1280,100,5620,1219,91,1239],"class_list":["post-3389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-popular","tag-ceo039s","tag-falls","tag-price","tag-rattling","tag-seagate","tag-stock","tag-warning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.thestreet.com\/.image\/NDA6MDAwMDAwMDAzMDQ5ODkz\/canada-20250507-in-this-photo-illustration-the-seagate-technology-logo-is-seen-displayed-on-a-smartphone-screen-photo-illustration-by-thomas-fullersopa-imageslightrocket-via-getty-images-stockpack-get.jpg?profile=rss\"){kind=logo}
How far Seagate stock fell after the Mosley warning<\/h2>\n
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What Mosley actually said about wafer lead times<\/h2>\n
The supply-versus-demand debate Wall Street needs settled<\/h2>\n
The bear case: a richly priced stock with no room to slip<\/h2>\n
The bull case: scarcity, pricing power, and rising targets<\/h2>\n
Where other Wall Street firms see Seagate stock heading<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\nSources: Yahoo Finance, 24\/7 Wall St., Investing.com\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nWhat still has to happen for the bull thesis to hold<\/h2>\n
Four things Seagate needs to confirm at fiscal Q4 earnings<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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What this means for investors right now<\/h2>\n