Another year of sluggish return on investment (fell in calendar 2011 due to investments in price, e-commerce, etc.) as Wal-Mart places capital into a robust amount of international unitgrowth and profit dollars into lower prices.
One of the reasons our capital spending budget is going up is that we see PC unitgrowth north of 10% for the foreseeable future, driven by emerging markets.
Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes this morning trimmed his forecast for 2011 PC unitgrowth to 5%, from 8%, due to a combination of the impact of the chaos in Japan and weaker-than-expected consumer demand.
Combined with expected unitgrowth in 2012 and going into 2013 it is likely that 2012 will be a good year for capital equipment suppliers for the HDD industry.