News

posted on 23 July 2008 11:11

Research house iSuppli has revealed shipment figures showing that the hard disk drive industry is in rude health and growing.

In the second quarter 137 million HDDS were shipped, 21 percent up on Q2 '07.

There has been no indication of a market slowdown which has affected the NAND flash industry. So far so good we might say. Much flash is bought by consumers whereas the bulk of hard drives are bought by business.

However an iSuppli analyst implied that hard disk drive sales had been affected by a slowdown with Krishna Chander, senior analyst for storage systems at iSuppli, said: “Unlike the NAND flash chip industry, HDD vendors have been able to resist the worst impacts of the economic slowdown by learning how to control their costs. The industry also has been aided by increased demand for more storage in PCs—as new applications demand increasingly larger-capacity HDDs. As long as demand for low-cost storage capacity keeps rising, the HDD industry will find ways to deliver.”

There were healthy HDD vendors operating margins in the first quarter. Seagate reported US$363 million in profits, or 11.7% of revenue, Western Digital announced US$298 million, or a 14% return and Hitachi GST stated it had earned US$65 million, or 4.6% of revenue.

The research house says all six major HDD vendors are expecting unit shipments to grow and it reckons there will be 572.9 million hard drives shipped in total in 2008, up 17 percent from 516.2 million in 2007.

It remains to be seen how flash solid state drive (SSD) developments will affect the HDD industry.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}