Shipments of hard disk drives (HDD) amounted to 167.1 million units in the second quarter ending June 2011, up 4.1% from 160.5 million in the first quarter, according a new IHS iSuppli Storage Space Market Brief.
The market was led by Western Digital with 32% of global unit shipments, followed closely by Seagate Technology at 31%, the IHS report said.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies at 16%, Toshiba/Fujitsu at 11% and Samsung Electronics at 10% have shared the rest of the HDD market.
The report found that HDD shipments rose during the second quarter, with each hard drive maker meeting its revenue forecast, despite Japan quake disaster in March and the continuing decline of netbook sales because of tablet devices
IHS analyst for storage systems Fang Zhang said growth was achieved partially from a pull-in of orders by PC manufacturers fearing a potential shortage of components from the quake’s impact, and also by suppliers utilising less expensive sea freight to ship goods instead of costly air freight.
In the second quarter, Western Digital shipped 53.8 million HDDs, a growth of6% from the previous quarter, and revenue totalled to $2.4bn, second only to Seagate at $2.9bn, which shipped 52.3 million HDD units, up 7.2%.
Both Western Digital and Seagate suffered margin erosion with their slightly lower non-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) operating margins at 6.4% and 4.4%, respectively
While Seagate lowering of non-GAAP is attributed to higher commodity prices, increased competition, the lower margin of notebook disk drives, and recall of some of its 1-terabyte mobile drives, Western Digital’s is to including a broader pricing decline, increased investment in new products, and higher acquisition- and litigation-related expenses.
IHS expects HDD shipments will rise 3.4% in the third quarter of 2011, primarily due to anticipated sales increases during the back-to-school and pre-holiday season on the consumer front, as well as continued corporate PC upgrades driving the enterprise segment.
The enterprise space will remain strong due to new microprocessors such as Sandy Bridge and Romley from Intel, and Bulldozer and Interlagos from Advanced Micro Devices.
IHS believes the enterprise HDD demand in the second half of this year will augmented by the adoption of these new processors by enterprise businesses, which demand higher performance for server and storage virtualisation.
