Now the dust has had time to settle at Maxtor Corp, the San Jose company has been left to do what it does best – produce high capacity hard disk drives. Since the South Korean Hyundai Group’s Hyundai Electronics America Inc unit took the remaining 63% of Maxtor for an estimated $220m, giving it a 100% holding, there have been a few changes to the set-up, although European sales and marketing director Chris Brown is keen to stress that Maxtor is to be left to get on with things independently of its new parent. There has been a shake-up in senior management, with M H Chung heading-up operations as chairman of the board and Y H Kim slipping into the president and chief executive’s seat. Rick Brantmeyer has jumped ship from Irvine California-based Western Digital Corp to join the company as senior vice president of sales and marketing. Maxtor currently lies in fourth place in the world storage market, and Hyundai has announced its intention to take the company to third place by the turn of the century. Not an unachievable goal according to Brown, in spite of reported pre-takeover figures for the nine months to December 1995 showing a net loss of about $83m for the second year running. The acquisition will give the company access to Hyundai’s manufacturing facilities, and give it the much-needed cash to expand. A new factory in Seoul, South Korea should be up and running Within the next eight weeks, with more planned for 1997.

Extremely risky

Following the trend set this week by fellow storage companies Seagate Technology Corp and Quantum Corp, the latest offering has been duly introduced from the Maxtor stable in the shape of a 2Gb three-platter 3.5 hard disk drive. Unlike its competitors, Maxtor is keeping its distance from the 5.25 format, which Brown describes as an extremely risky market. It may be the last to announce its new technology, but Maxtor says the product has already shipped in high volumes to eight of the top 10 OEM customers. With a recommended retail price of #269 it’s not yet clear how this will compare with Seagate’s offerings. Its 3.5 4Gb and 2.5 2.25Gb drives will not be available until next quarter and it continues to be coy about pricing. The Maxtor 2Gb disk drive has an Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics interface with an average seek time of 12mS, available with either 128Kb or 64Kb buffers. It’s compatible with all major motherboards and compliant with the ATA2 and developing ATA3 standard. In addition to its standard reseller channels, Maxtor is set to target the 1.4m personal computers that International Data Corp estimates will be upgraded this year, to take the company closer to the coveted number three spot, said Brown. Latest results from International Data estimate average upgrades for hardware takes place within 17 months of purchase, 50% of which occur within the first 12 months.