HDD industry needs to transform itself over next five years to accelerate revenue growth

FRAMINGHAM, USA: Despite the threat of media tablets and solid state drives (SSDs) slowing worldwide hard disk drive (HDD) unit shipment growth, the HDD industry has tremendous revenue expansion opportunities over the next five years. According to new research from International Data Corp. (IDC), HDD industry revenue will grow from $33.4 billion in 2010 to $48.2 billion in 2015. But the HDD industry will need to transform itself and reorder its priorities to realize this revenue growth.

HDD demand will continue to be founded in traditional IT segments, however, unit shipment growth will be driven mainly by the expansion of public and private cloud storage infrastructure and, more importantly, by demand from consumers and small businesses for private or personal cloud storage devices and solutions. HDD industry revenue growth will be accelerated based on broadening adoption of storage devices that help to speed up overall PC performance.

"The HDD industry needs to shift its R&D priorities, giving more attention to developing faster HDD performance for PC markets while simultaneously delivering HDD capacity advancements to support enterprise storage growth demands," said John Rydning, research director for Storage Mechanisms: Disk. "At the same time, HDD vendors have an opportunity to transform into storage solution providers with a broad range of products that address the needs of both consumers and small businesses."

Key findings from IDC's HDD market research include the following:

* With or without industry consolidation, HDD average selling price (ASP) declines will slow near term as HDD technology advancements are slowing, making it more difficult for HDD vendors to reduce HDD bill of material costs.

* Long term, the HDD industry has an opportunity to increase HDD ASPs with hybrid NAND and rotating disk storage devices aimed at the PC market.

* The personal storage market continues to be one of the strongest growth segments for the HDD industry.