14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate recently published its financial results for the latest quarter and, since it was on the subject, it talked a bit about the HDD shortage and how it would go from there.
People may remember that, back in January, 2012, Hitachi said it didn't expect the supply of HDD to fully recover until late this year.
Seagate seems to agree with this, having stated (more like warned) that the impact of the Thailand floods (of last year) would be felt throughout the year.
“Seagate believes that while the industry's ability to supply drives is slowly improving, demand will continue to exceed supply during calendar year 2012,” Seagate said.
Seagate's situation is actually very ironic, especially when compared to that of Western Digital and Hitachi.
As we mentioned yesterday (February 1, 2012), the company actually benefited from the sudden undersupply situation.
Long story short, the rapid hikes in unit prices led to profits and boosted the company's profitability by a huge deal (375%).
It no doubt helped its situation that it was the only major supplier of hard disk drive units that got off easy after the floods.
Though Western Digital's plants were severely affected, Seagate was not directly impaired at all.
In the end, it only had to prepare for lower component supply on the part of Nidec, the primary maker of HDD motors.
Nidec managed to restore operations quite swiftly, though, which put Seagate in a much more favorable position that WD.
For everyday customers, this all means that hard drives will be overpriced for quite a while and that Seagate units will probably be more readily available than others.
The company's storage devices are bound to be more widespread among laptops as well. One can only wonder how the HDD market shares will evolve. WD, with Hitachi's acquisition, easily gets the first spot, but Seagate may just threaten that position thanks to its so-called luck in this matter.