Yeah, they started shipping 160 GB per platter longitudinal drives last fall, well ahead of anyone else on areal density, and just announced a 160 GB 2.5" (two platter) and 20 GB 1" using perpendicular. WDC (#2 in the space @ 15% share) is struggling with both high density longitudinal and perpendicular, and Hitachi HGST (#3) is losing $500M a year. After that, you drop to the third tier players (Fujitsu, Samsung, and Toshiba) at ~ 6% share. STX is 30% share now, and is acquiring 13% Maxtor. They are making $1B a year, and their profits are growing. The number of outstanding shares is comparable to AMD, and a few months ago their market caps matched. AMD has outstripped them from a share price perspective, but has yet to earn $2 a year. The new Sun Galaxy servers pair high performance Opteron CPUs with high capacity, high performance Seagate 2.5" drives. In general, a CPU sale is an HDD sale. The big sea change for the HDD biz is the addition of consumer electronics to their traditional PC base. They are finding their way into GPS, DVR, PVR, cell phones, music players, TVs, automotive dashboards, etc. Seagate's CTO predicts that in a few years, the average consumer will have 15 to 20 HDDs, without being aware of it.
I'll stop with these somewhat OT posts now. |
