New York, Feb 20, 2026, 11:07 EST — Regular trading underway.
- Western Digital shares climbed roughly 2.5% in the morning session, following a sharp swing from the open to the day’s high.
- Sandisk has priced its secondary stock offering—shares owned by Western Digital—at $545 apiece, part of a debt-for-equity swap.
- Western Digital’s chief sales and marketing officer unloaded 10,000 shares, according to a filing, with the sale executed through a pre-arranged trading plan.
Western Digital Corp jumped 2.5% to $291.77 Friday, moving between $278.80 and $294.20 through the session. Sandisk was up 2.6%, closing at $636.99.
Why does the stock action count? Investors want to see if Western Digital can slash debt hard—without flooding the market with its own shares. The details are tangled, but the number-crunching isn’t: drop the debt, drop the overhang.
It’s hitting just as storage stocks have been moving on leverage plays and timing, not only demand. Western Digital, for its part, is still working to persuade investors it’s now a more streamlined, hard-disk drive operation, following last year’s split.
Western Digital is looking to raise $3.17 billion by offloading part of its Sandisk stake—a move to chip away at its $4.69 billion debt pile as of January. According to Reuters, the company will swap about 5.8 million Sandisk shares to settle debt held by J.P. Morgan and BofA Securities affiliates. (Reuters)
Sandisk said in its statement that 5,821,135 shares would change hands at $545 each, with the company itself not taking in any proceeds from this offering or the debt swap attached to it. Western Digital will hold onto 1,691,884 Sandisk shares after the exchange wraps up, planning to sell off what’s left down the line. The offering’s close is slated for Feb. 19, pending certain conditions. (Business Wire)
Debt-for-equity exchanges are just that — companies trade debt for shares, reducing liabilities. With a secondary offering, it’s not Sandisk creating fresh stock; it’s Western Digital unloading its stake through the banks.
A prospectus supplement from Sandisk spells out the targeted debt: Western Digital term loans worth roughly $3.086 billion are on the table. If the exchange and offering go through, that debt’s set to be “cancelled and retired,” according to the filing. (SEC)
In a separate disclosure, a Form 4 revealed that Chief Sales & Marketing Officer Brian Scott Davis offloaded 10,000 Western Digital shares on Feb. 17, citing a Rule 10b5-1 plan he’d established back on Nov. 3, 2025. These preset trading plans let insiders transact on a fixed timetable, regardless of any future access to confidential information. (SEC)
Evercore ISI’s Amit Daryanani described the deal as “a material acceleration of WDC’s deleveraging efforts.” Western Digital CFO Kris Sennesael, for his part, told MarketWatch the company planned “to monetize those shares before the one-year anniversary” of the split. (MarketWatch)
The trade isn’t bulletproof. Should the offering settlement get delayed or Sandisk shares take a hit, Western Digital stays exposed—its leftover stake still tied to the ups and downs of flash-memory values, just as it’s working to recast itself as a more stable HDD player.
Traders now turn to see if the Sandisk offering and the linked debt swap have wrapped up, with an ear out for new remarks from Sandisk execs at investor conferences kicking off Feb. 25. (Business Wire)
