What the competition thinks of QNTM's push into network storage
biz.yahoo.com
Thursday March 4, 4:04 am Eastern Time
INTERVIEW-EMChopes to see 15 pct Asia sales
By Alicia Seow
SINGAPORE, March 4 (Reuters) - Dominant data storage provider EMC Corp hopes Asia will contribute 15 percent of its turnover in two or three years, against 10 percent in 1998, a senior executive said on Thursday.
"We want more growth out of Asia," executive vice president of markets and channels Robert Dutkowsky told Reuters in an interview.
"We'd probably like to see Asia grow another five percentage points in contribution over the next couple of years," he said. "Fifteen percent without Japan would be a good number for us."
Dutkowsky was in Singapore to launch EMC's new networked storage systems in Asia.
In 1998, the Asia-Pacific region including Japan contributed 10 percent to the market leader's $3.97 billion turnover, the Americas 60 percent and Europe, the
Middle East and Africa the remaining 30 percent, he said.
Dutkowsky said he would prefer sales distribution to be more even.
"We had a very strong 1998 in Asia Pacific.
"But the problem is not that Asia is not growing. The problem is North America is growing so fast...they pulled away," he said.
Dutkowsky said growth from Asia would track EMC's overall revenue and profit growth forecast of at least 30 percent in 1999.
According to Dataquest figures, the Hopkinton, Mass. company increased its share of the market for external storage systems to 35 percent in 1998 from 30 percent a year earlier.
IBM (NYSE:IBM - news) was second at 22 percent and no other competitor had more than a 10 percent market share, EMC said.
Commenting on Quantum Corp's (Nasdaq:QNTM - news) commitment to boost its networked storage offerings, Dutkowsky said he did not see much competition in the short term from the traditional disk drive maker.
"The only two companies that can measure up to our qualities are IBM (NYSE:IBM - news) and Seagate (NYSE:SEG - news)."
EMC packs its refrigerator-sized storage units with scores of hard disks it buys from IBM and Seagate.
EMC shares closed on Wednesday at US$97- after ending on Tuesday at $98-03/16. |
