Seagate Technology, the world's leading hard-disk-drive manufacturer, intends to maintain its status with a 37-per-cent share of the global market this year.
It expects 650 million to 670 million hard-disk drives of all brands to be manufactured worldwide, up from 590 million last year. The Asia-Pacific, especially Japan, is the main driver of Seagate's revenue.
The market for hard-disk drives has grown more than the personal-computer market in recent years, thanks to increased demand for them in new types of electronic products, such as set-top boxes, DVD devices and surveillance systems.
BB Teh, vice president and managing director for Asia-Pacific at Seagate Technology, said the Asia-Pacific was a very exciting market for the company, generating more than half of company revenue.
Last year, the Asia-Pacific contributed revenue of US$4.5 billion (Bt149 billion) to Seagate's, and it has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of 14 per cent over the past six years.
The Asia-Pacific enjoys the highest gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the world. Regional GDP is forecast to grow 5.7 per cent this year, while the global rate is pegged at only 2 per cent.
"The Asia-Pacific is the largest and fastest-growing market right now. It is very important to us, and Thailand is one of our main markets inside it," said Teh.
Seagate has targeted its growth in Thailand to beat the 15 per cent forecast for the industry this year. It will continue to roll out its new, innovative products within its four main segments: enterprise products, desktops, notebooks and consumer products.
Teh said the main hard-disk drive used in the enterprise segment was a 2.5-inch 300-gigabyte drive, while the desktop and notebook segments preferred 500GB.
For the consumer segment, Seagate will introduce its new external hard-disk drive, with USB3.0 support, a 1-terabyte capability and a small 2.5-inch size, as launched at CES 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada last month.
The company will also focus more on solid-state drives (SSDs). Both Gartner and International Data estimate the global market for SSDs at 1 billion units this year, reaching more than 2 billion units annually within the next three years.
"SSDs are a high-potential market, but its penetration compared with the overall hard-disk-drive market remains small at present. Our strategy is to provide SSDs to our enterprise customers - especially large ones- that have applications requiring SSD technology," said Teh.
