Seagate still king as hard drive shipments up 15.5% in 2006
Global shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) rose 15.5% in 2006, as suppliers managed to capitalize on growth opportunities while shrugging off challenges including price wars, component shortages and competitive upheavals, according to research firm iSuppli. The HDD industry in 2006 shipped 434.2 million hard drives, up 15.5% from 375.8 million in 2005. In the fourth quarter of 2006, 119.7 million HDDs were shipped, up 15.8% compared to the same period a year earlier and an 8.3% increase from the third quarter, said the research firm.
Seagate Technology’s acquisition of competitor Maxtor spurred a price war in the first half of 2006 as HDD suppliers vied to capture a portion of the market-share vacuum left open by the merger. The industry also faced shortages of glass media, along with minor shortfalls of other components near the end of the year. Meanwhile, demand slowed for tiny 1-inch HDDs because makers of MP3 players increasingly are turning away from rotating media and toward flash memory for music storage. As a result, small-sized HDD specialist Cornice declared that it was changing its business strategy of serving the MP3/PMP/mobile phone market by switching from selling HDDs to offering NAND-type flash memory based solutions.
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