Seagate optimistic for storage market in 2010

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Celebrating completion of 30 successful years marked by consistent market and technology leadership, Seagate looks forward to a very positive 2010 riding on revival of economies Asia Pacific region especially India and China.

B.S. Teh, Seagate’s Executive Vice President and Managing Director for Asia Pacific & Japan, said that Seagate is the only hard disc manufacturer to have achieved shipment volume of 1-billion drives in 2008 and is still the only HDD company to have crossed this landmark and said that it would achieve the next 1 billion within the next five years, riding on the back of explosive requirement for storage both at enterprise and consumer levels.

The company projects positive outlook for the storage industry in 2010 and expects the growing digital lifestyles and exploding enterprise data to drive growth. Asia-Pacific and Japan contribute almost half of the Company's revenue. Seagate remains strongly committed to the Asia Pacific and Japan region. It is predicted that enterprise data will grow by over six times over the next four to five years.

With applications like SMS (the number of text messages sent every single day, which is currently, about 6,5 billion that is more than population on earth) and other communication and entertainment devices, already the HDD commissions 1.5 million drives every day. Seagate anticipates that 40 Exabytes of unique new information will be generated in this year globally, while traffic on the world-wide-web would grow at 40% CAGR over the same period. All this usage requires storage at the backend.

India is key player of Seagate’s growth strategy as anticipated investment in IT infrastructure, of which storage is a key component, pick up pace. Indian enterprises will be looking to rationalizing their storage with adoption of newer technologies like storage virtualization, de-duplication, thin provisioning, thin cloning, data storage is well on the way to recovery. Seagate is confident that as the technology and market leader, it is well poised to be at the forefront of this potential market.

Seagate is extremely bullish about the consumer segment of the market as well. Seagate has also strengthened its end-consumer offerings with its lineup of stylish FreeAgent portable and desktop external drives, and consumer electronics devices such as the FreeAgent Theater+ HD media player and the Replica backup appliance, launched recently.