Financial

posted on 01 August 2008 04:41

Hitachi's disk drive manufacturing subsidiary, Hitachi GST, recorded a third successive quarterly profit helping Hitachi itself record a profitable quarter.

Hitachi reported Q1 fy09 revenues of $23.95 billion, up 3 percent from the year-ago quarter, with net incomes of $298 million ($0.09/share). The rise was mainly due to higher revenues from the Information and Telecommunications Systems (ITS) business unit and the Power and Industrial Systems unit.

There were quarterly revenues of $5.6 billion for ITS, an increase of 7 percent year on year. These were due mainly to increased software (middleware) and service sales but also to increased hardware sales, including disk array subsystems and the third successive quarter of profits from Hitachi GST's hard disk drives. This was ascribed to structural reforms in HGST, understood to mean lower costs and shorter production times for its read/write heads.

HGST reported revenues of $1.43 billion, up 17 percent year-on-year and 1.1 percent sequentially. It shipped about 22 million drives in the quarter but it is believed, according to analyst sources, to have lost market share, particularly in the 2.5-inch market segment where Seagate is resurgent. HGST is doing fairly well in the enterprise drive segment but proportionately badly in the desktop and, even worse, in the mobile drive segments.

This is apparently the first time that HGST has been profitable for more than two quarters in a row.

In the light of economic conditions Hitachi is maintaining its cautious outlook from May.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}