With its purchase of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), hard drive maker Western Digital (WDC) will pad its lead in the global hard disk drive (HDD) market, giving it nearly double the market share of the number two supplier Seagate Technology. With the purchase, WDC will claim 49.6% share of global HDD shipments based on fourth-quarter totals, compared to 29.4% for Seagate. This will give WDC a lead of 20.2 percentage points over Seagate, up from a mere two points without the acquisition.
The Hitachi purchase will allow WDC to enter the critical enterprise HDD segment. WDC currently is only a marginal player in the enterprise HDD market, with nearly all of its sales going instead to the market for consumer drives, an area that includes products like desktop and mobile PCs, set-top boxes and video game consoles. Of all of the major HDD suppliers, Western Digital in the fourth quarter of 2010 had the smallest share of any company's total shipments going to the enterprise segment, at less than 1%. In comparison, 65% of Seagate's HDD shipments and 27% of Hitachi GST's shipments went to the enterprise market.
iSuppli: WD will now capture nearly half of the HDD market
Posted on Tuesday, March 08 2011 @ 21:11 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck