Posted on Sunday, January 23 2011 @ 12:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Market research firm IDC reports Western Digital was the largest hard disk drive maker in the fourth quarter of 2010 as well as in the full year. However, Seagate still has the largest revenue thanks to its higher presence in the enterprise-class and mobile HDD markets.
WD shipped 52.2 million hard disk drives in the quarter that enter on December 31, 2010. Seagate supplied 48.9 million HDDs in the same timeframe. Average selling price (ASP) of a WD hard drive was approximately $47 per unit, down $5 year-over-year and up $1 sequentially. Seagate did not reveal its ASPs, but traditionally there are a little higher compared to Western Digital as the Scotts Valley, California-based company has a lot of lucrative products in its portfolio.
The two companies predicted that the total available market of hard drives will be in the range between 155 and 165 million in Q1 2011.
Throughout the whole calendar 2010 Western Digital consistently outsold Seagate on unit basis. During the conference call with financial analysts the latter said that despite of slowing demand it decided not to reduce prices in order to sell more units. Indirectly, the move shows that the company is not exactly comfortable with its cost-structure and may simply be unable to profitably fulfill certain orders to maintain its unit market share.
Source: X-bit Labs
