HDD industry to face supply challenges due to earthquake

The global hard disk drive (HDD) industry, already facing challenges from solid state drives (SSDs), cloud computing and limitation of vertical read-write technologies, is expected to face even more challenges resulting from the March 11 earthquake in northeastern Japan, which has severely damaged the plants of local HDD component makers including hard disk maker Showa Denko, and HDD-use substrate makers Furukawa Denko and Kobe Steel. These makers have all reported damage to facilities as well as injuries of employees and have shut down their operations pending further evaluation.

Showa Denko currently has about 25% share of the global hard disk market and in addition to its plants in Japan, the company also has plants in Taiwan and Singapore that can fill in for the suspended capacity at the damaged plants in Japan. Since Showa Denko's clients Western Digital and Seagate also have a portion of their hard disk supplies from in-house production, Digitimes Research believes that the hard disk market will not see any immediate shortages.