The hard drive disk market is expected to suffer a pretty major decline in the coming year after a slow decline could already be seen in 2012.
According to iSuppli the global HDD market revenue will decline by approximately 12 percent in 2013 settling at an estimated $32.7 billion revenue compared to the previous $37.1 billion from 2012. On top of this gross and operating margins for HDD manufacturers are also expected to decline as a result of falling prices.
According to Fang Zhang, analyst for iSupply “the HDD industry will face a myriad challenges in 2013. Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favor smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs.”
However, even this decline in prices and revenue HDDs will still continue to dominate the market for the foreseeable future. This is mainly because of storage capacity HDD having a big lead over SSDs in regards to the dollars/gigabyte ratio. And this trend will continue in 2013 with average prices for HDDs expected to fall by approximately 7%. “HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for Ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing,” Zhang added.
On a company front Western Digital is expected to continue to battle with Seagate Technologies for dominance in the market space in both revenue and shipments especially on the enterprise side of things. According to iSuppli Seagate held about a 50% in the enterprise market but new evolving technologies from Western Digital could send them to second place in 2013.
Source: iSuppli | Hard drive image