Market For Hard Disk Drives Gently Spinning Down

The French site silicon.fr’s Christopher Lagane says that faced with competition from SSD flash memory development, the venerable hard disk will experience a serious production slowdown in the coming years.

Lagane notes that the market for PC hard disk drives is less and less profitable, as evidenced by the recent merger of the industry’s surviving big players – Seagate acquiring Samsung’s HDD business a few weeks after Western Digital swallowed Hitachi Storage – and tech marker analyst firm IHS (formerly iSuppli) predicting a “dramatic slowdown” of income for the HDD sector between 2011 and 2010 – a deceleration that will continue in coming years.

Lagane cites IHS HDD market projection metrics that forecast a market for disk storage media totalling $32.1 billion in 2015, a relatively modest increase from $27 billion in 2010.

The lazy growth potential for HDDs is attributed by IHS storage systems analyst Zhang Fang to competition from flash memory based mobile devices which, according to the analyst, have broken the “hegemony of the PC” as consumers increasingly switch to tablets and smartphones as hardware for surfing the Internet, downloading and streaming video, and sharing content, with tablets in particular nabbing consumers’ money that would have otherwise been spent on laptops or netbooks, and by extension because tablets use flash memory for storing data rather than hard disk drives, that translates into lost sales for the HDD industry.

Perceived brighter outlooks for the HDD industry are found in the proliferation of Cloud based Internet services over the next few years combined with continued strong enterprise PC market dynamics.

For the full report (French language) visit here:
http://bit.ly/kCZf7p