HDD industry to see strong rebound in 2010 | Bangkok Post: tech

Economic recovery and storage demands will drive the hard disk drive industry (HDD) with worldwide shipments forecast to reach 650 to 670 million units this year, according to Ban Seng Teh, Vice President and Managing Director for Asia Pacific and Japan Seagate Technology, the world leader with a 31 percent market share.

Ban Seng Teh, Vice President and Managing Director for Asia Pacific and Japan Seagate Technology, celebrates the 30th anniversary of the company.

This year's estimate will grow 15 percent from the previous year, which reached 590 million units. There has been a strong recovery of the market since the second quarter of 2009 and the market has recovered to the level it was in 2007 before the global economic recession.

The continuous growth will drive traffic on the Internet which is expected to exceed 56 exabytes per month by 2013 and has a compound growth rate of 40 percent.

Moreover, the consumer usage trend that sends around 6.5 billion text messages in 24 hours - a figure which exceeds the world's population - is similar to enterprise usage, with data demand expected to grow 650 percent over the next five years.

There are few application usage trends in various areas especially mobile wireless, data analytics, digital video, System Density which drive storage in 2009 to 2011 while cloud computing will gaining momentum from the second half of 2010 to 2012.

In addition, the demand of the market which is ahead of supply makes prices more stable, bringing better industry profit margins combined with consolidation between manufacturers and restructuring cost efficiency in order to survive during the economic downturn.

Last year, Seagate undertook various programs to reduce operation expenses such as reducing the workforce, closing manufacturing facilities in Singapore and keeping only its media operation there while Thailand, Malaysia and China remain the core manufacturing bases.

SSD a new growth opportunity

Ban continued that solid state drive (SSD) is another growth opportunity that Seagate will focus on as one important initiative to invest in research and development.

IDC indicated that SSD shipments will reach $1 billion (33 billion baht) in 2010 and is expected to reach $2 billion (66 billion baht) within three years.

However, even with this level of market growth he still believed that SSD will gain less than five percent of the market share compared with HDD due to high costs.

Recently, the company introduced the Pulsar drive which is the first product in its new enterprise SSD family. The Pulsar drive uses single-level cell (SLC) technology, delivers up to 200GB capacity, and is built in a 2.5-inch small form factor with a SATA interface.

It is designed for external storage in high and mid-range systems as well as entry RAID and Performance Upsell servers which mostly deal directly with global OEM partners such as EMC, HP, LSI and HDS.

"In SSD, there is too much market hype and too many vendors in this area - approximately over 100 vendors and mostly from consumer focus or start-up companies that may not understand enterprise class environments, so we decided to enter SSD in the enterprise market because our core competency is knowing customer needs during the last 30 years. And I believe that in the long run, the SSD market will consolidate as with the HDD market."

Exploring emerging markets

In addition to expanding its product category, the company will explore new emerging markets in order to broaden its geographical reach in the Asia Pacific region including new application usages areas such as medical devices, surveillance systems and consumer electronics - especially set-top-box or home media centres which have a high growth potential in Japan, Taiwan and Korea.

Currently, Asia Pacific contributes over 50 percent revenue of the overall business since the first quarter of the fiscal year 2010 or third quarter in the calendar year and has gained consecutive growth over the past five years.

"This region has strong GDP growth and the world leading original equipment manufacturers or OEM desktop is among the six out of top 10 in Asia, similar to the notebook market," Ban said.

The company is planning to introduce new innovative products in the next few months, such as the BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 portable external hard drive performance kit for notebook computers.

This all-in-one USB 3.0 toolkit packages a 500GB 7200RPM 2.5-inch portable hard drive, power cable and PC express card, to deliver proven speeds up to three times faster than its USB 2.0, making it one of the fastest portable hard drives available.

For the desktop market, it has the world's fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive, the Barracuda XT featuring 2TB of storage capacity and a blazing fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second interface. This can meet the capacity demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage-hungry desktop computing applications.

Relate Search: Ban Seng Teh, Vice President, Seagate Technology