The economic slump has hit the storage device market in last year and the biggest victim is the hard disk drives. World's leading drive manufacturers, Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate, and Hitachi have gone through low revenue during the last year. The trend is supposed to continue in 2009 as well and there is no sign of recovering of consumer hard disk drive market from the current recession until 2011.
Tom Coughlin, principal analyst of Coughlin Associates, in his latest Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, reported that the fourth quarter of 2008 has seen a significant drop in hard disk drive shipments. It declined by almost 19% from the third quarter, as a result of which the shipments of HDD units increased only by 8% from 2007.
As per the Coughlin reports, 540 million units of HDD were shipped in 2008, a mere 40 million increment from last year.
The sales of desktop and laptop are likely to dip by at least 5% in 2009, and since PCs are the largest users of HDDs so its market is supposed to take a dip as well. According to the report, the consumer electronic products using flash are supposed to decline by 7% or even more in 2009 from 2008.
Coughlin wrote that "there is more downside than upside ahead, and as a consequence, HDD unit shipments in 2009 will experience their worst year-over-year decline ever. The total decline in HDD units in 2009 over 2008 will be between 5 percent and 9 percent, with a decline of 7 percent being likely."
However despite the slump in economy and storage device market, the future is not so worrying. The reason is that the actual storage requirement continue to increase and as a result the decline this year will lead to substantial growth in HDD units after the recovering of economy. 2010 could see positive growth and with the recovery year by year, 2011 could see more than 20 percent growth.
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