Western Digital continues to drastically reduce the production of hard drives

Next week is expected to publish quarterly reports from Western Digital and Seagate - two long-term leaders in the production of hard drives. Until last year, Western Digital was the world's number one supplier of platter drives. But last year the company began to change strategy, which was probably influenced by the May 2016 takeover of SanDisk and the NAND flash, SSD and memory card business. Release of WDC products shrunk so much so that Seagate was able to return own title of leader. But that's not all. Toshiba, which previously held a little more than 10% of the HDD market, began to grow rapidly in this direction and even threatens to push WDC to the last third position in the future.

Why such pessimism? Trendfocus analysts published preliminary results for hard drive shipments in the first quarter of calendar year 2019. Official reports in a week will help to clarify these data, but Trendfocus is usually not very wrong. According to their data, it turns out that in the annual comparison in the first quarter, Western Digital was the strongest in the industry in reducing the supply of hard drives: by 25-26,1% or up to 26,90-27,30 million units. Seagate reduced HDD shipments by 13,4-14,4% over the year, or to 31,40-31,80 million units, while Toshiba reduced shipments by 9,3-11,3%, or to 18,30-18,70 .41 million pieces. Accordingly, the shares of companies in the HDD market have changed: Seagate now owns 40,9% - 34,1% of the market, WDC - 35,1% - 23,9%, and Toshiba - 24% - XNUMX%.

Breaking down shipments of hard drives by major category, 3,5-inch and 2,5-inch drives showed a decline in shipments, which, given the post-holiday season, is considered acceptable. So, in the first quarter of 3,5-inch drives, 4 million units were shipped less - 24,5 million units. 2,5-inch drives shipped 6 million fewer or 37 million quarterly. Server HDD shipments have grown, for which the growth of cloud services is to be thanked. The volume of sales in this area grew by 1 million HDDs to 11,5 million units for the quarter. In total, in the first quarter, manufacturers shipped no more than 77,8 million hard drives, which is about 18% less than a year ago.

Source: 3dnews.ru