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Published on April 29, 2008

Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul

The Nation

Due to the explosion of digital content in recent years, the world's leading storage manufacturer Seagate Technology plans to ship one billion hard-disk drives (HDD) around the world by 2012.

Ban Seng Teh, vice president and managing director of Seagate's Asia Pacific Sales & Marketing Organisation, said the company announced last week it was the first HDD maker to have shipped one billion units.

"Although we took 29 years to reach the first milestone, we will ship the next billion in less than five years," he said.

Seagate has HDD production plants worldwide, including three in Thailand.

Ban forecast the global HDD market would continue to increase by 10 to 15 per cent a year. Only Seagate would experience aggressive growth of 80 per cent from 2006 to 2012.

The rapid growth of digital content comes from a wide range of sources such as digital stills, phone-cameras and user-generated content sites like YouTube.

"Digital content proliferation is pushing demand for hard drives to more than 700 million units a year by 2012," he said.

Apart from HDD, it will actively deploy solid state technology, including Hybrid and solid state drives (SSD), in places where it meets customer's demands and adds more value to its products.

It will deliver SSD products in the second half of this year to meet demand in the enterprise market, he said.

For the nine months ended March 28, Seagate reported revenue of US$9.8 billion (Bt308 billion), up from $8.616 billion from the same period last year.

Of total revenue, around 65 per cent was generated from original equipment manufacturer products and the remainder from distributors.

Ban said about 41 per cent of the company's revenue came from the Asia-Pacific region, which is its largest market, 31 per cent from the United States and the remaining 28 per cent from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"Our revenue in Asia Pacific in the fiscal year 2007 was up 23 per cent from the previous year. We believe that both production and shipment in this region will continue to expand rapidly," he said.

Seagate has allocated around $1 billion to invest in research and development.