Western Digital Corp.’s Michael Ray helped the disk drive maker navigate the darkest days of the downturn, when the company was paring jobs by the thousands.
In a business known for sharp ups and downs, Western Digital moved quickly when the financial meltdown struck and the recession took hold in earnest in late 2008.
As corporations and consumers suddenly stopped spending on technology, the company swiftly cut jobs, pared executive pay, slowed production at factories and slashed other costs.
It cut about 2,500 jobs, or 5% of its workers, and temporarily idled factories in Malaysia and Thailand that make drives and parts.
Ray, Western Digital’s vice president of corporate law, said his role was to help top executives “strike a balance between trying to be as reasonable and as human as possible while looking at the risks.”
Earlier this month, Ray was honored with the Rising Star award at the Business Journal’s inaugural General Counsel Awards at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.
Ray was part of the legal team that counseled Chief Executive John Coyne and his human resources team through the tough work of laying off workers.
Coyne is credited with taking aggressive steps that helped the maker of drives for computers, storage devices and consumer electronics weather the downturn and bounce back quickly.
“That’s where our CEO showed amazing leadership,” Ray said. “He made some very difficult decisions, but he made the right ones.”
The moves paved the way for a stable market for drives in 2009 and allowed Western Digital to emerge as the industry’s top player, surpassing longtime rival Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC as the No. 1 maker of disk drives.
Ray landed at Western Digital in 2000 and has climbed the ranks in four different legal posts.
As head of legal services, he focuses on high-level strategy and heads the legal team.
His team is made up of 22 workers, including lawyers, stock plan professionals, paralegals and administrative assistants.
Ray advises senior managers on strategic issues and helps with deals. He also acts as an adviser to Western Digital’s board on executive compensation, governance, securities and litigation matters.
In addition to acquisitions, Ray also helps with more mundane deals, such as contracts for supplies, sales and distribution and intellectual property licenses.
Integration
Ray plays a big role in the integration of acquisitions.
With a background in employment and labor law, he helped with Western Digital’s 2003 acquisition of Silicon Valley’s bankrupt Read-Rite Corp. for about $95 million.
It was a complex deal that involved bidding on the assets of Read-Rite, which makes heads that read data on disks.
Ray called the auction “really fun.”
The not-so-fun part came when Western Digital had to get Read-Rite’s factory in Northern California up and running again.
“We had to get their operations going from the point of their fabrication facility having stopped running,” Ray said. “We hired 600 people in the course of a week. I was running around with a cell phone and a clipboard.”
Ray still travels to Read-Rite’s Fremont site and spends about a third of his time there.
In 2007, he had a hand in Western Digital’s $1 billion buy of San Jose’s Komag Inc., which makes thin-film metal disks, the part of a drive that stores data.
The deal, Western Digital’s biggest to date, was critical to the company’s strategy of making almost the entire disk drive on its own.
But there were “some integration issues,” Ray said.
Boston Native
Ray, 42, is a Boston native who lives in Huntington Beach.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ray was recruited to O’Melveny & Myers LLP in Newport Beach.
He stayed there for three years in the firm’s labor and employment practice.
He left private practice to clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Linda McLaughlin in Santa Ana.
Ray describes his clerkship for McLaughlin, who died in 1999, as “one of the best years in my life.”
He then spent two years at Orange-based Wynn’s International Inc., a maker of auto parts and chemicals that was bought out by Cleveland-based Parker Hannifin Corp. for nearly $500 million in 2000.
At Western Digital, Ray oversees legal affairs for Orange County’s second biggest public company with yearly sales of more than $9 billion and a recent market value of roughly $8 billion.
Ray also sits on the board of Mercy House Transitional Living Center in Santa Ana, which provides housing and services for the homeless. n
