TDK Thinks Toshiba's HDDs Will Gain More Share

With the new mergers on the HDD industry, competition has become more focused, with just three players now vying over control of the market, and TDK believes that Toshiba is not in as great a danger as some might think.

By now, end-users probably know of the great mergers that happened on the HDD market over the past year.

For those seeking a reminder, Western Digital bought Hitachi, while Seagate retaliated (eventually) by buying Samsung's HDD division.

As such, Toshiba was left as the only major company to not have done a move of this sort, ending up with just 10% of the market.

Thus, some might assume that Toshiba will have it hard, but TDK doesn't share this view, actually expecting the opposite.

"Toshiba is now ready to increase its production," said Takehiro Kamigama, president and chief executive officer of TDK.

"It is as if large swings occurred in a row. However, in the past reorganizations of the HDD industry, one plus one was not equal to two. It will be the same this time too. We expect that Toshiba's market share will increase to about 20%."

For those that don't know, TDK is the only independent maker of magnetic heads used in HDD production.

The outfit admits that, once the proceeding are done, WD, Seagate and Toshiba will control 50%, 40% and 10%, respectively, of the industry.

Still, PC makers will, TDK says, want to make sure they have as many sources of HDDs as possible, meaning that Toshiba could benefit from all this in the long run.

"The demand for high-recording-density, high-speed and energy-saving HDDs will grow more than ever. The concept of storage devices will change due to the earthquakes that hit Japan, making it necessary to develop a technology to combine SSDs and HDDs. Also, recording capacity required by customers operating data centers will increase because they need to diversify the risk of losing precious data," said the head of TDK.