News

posted on 24 April 2008 11:44

Storage analysis house iSuppli reports via Digitimes that 516 million hard disk drives (HDD) were shipped in 2007 and Seagate and Western Digital shipped 288.4 million of them.

The number of drives shipped in 2007 rose 18.9 percent from the 434 million shipped in 2006. HDD factory gate revenues rose to $32.8 billion, up 4.6 percent from 2006's $31.2 billion.

The market statistics show the leaders entrenching their positions:

1. Seagate - 33.9 percent share of the 2007 market with 175 million drives spinning out of its factories, compared to 33.1 percent in 2006.
2. Western Digital with 113 million drives shipped and a 22 percent share, up from 19.6 percent in 2006.
3. Hitachi GST with a 17.3 percent share in 2007, up encouragingly, from its 16.1 percent share in 2006.
4. Samsung with an 11.1 percent share.
5. Toshiba with a 7.2 percent share.
6. Fujitsu with a 6.9 percent share.
7. China's Excelstor with a 1.4 percent share.

There was fierce price competion in the first half of 2007 but prices stabilised in the second half.

Krishna Chander, the senior analyst for storage systems at iSuppli, said: "HDD suppliers apparently have realized that there are no major advantages to gaining a few points of share at the price of profitability. Such profitability is what keeps the engine of research and development churning in this industry, and HDD makers appear to have decided they don't want to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs."

The indications are that the NAND flash invasion of the hard drive market, while claiming the 1-inch drive HDD section's scalp and affecting the 1.8-inch market, has not impacted large format drive sales at all. Based on remarks by Toshiba Semiconductor's president reported yesterday  this may begin to happen next year and increase through 2009 and 2010.

It may be that the overall rise in data to be stored over the next few years means that total HDD shipments may still rise, although price pressure from flash solid state drives (SSD) may affect the HDD players, particularly the smaller ones.

It would appear likely that, for Hitachi GST to succeed in becoming a profitable and server-focused HDD supplier, it will have to take market share with Fujitsu looking a weaker supplier in this regard, than either Western Digital or Seagate.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}