14 DAY TRIAL // While AMD and Intel definitely have taken the concept of rivalry down to the last letter, the same could, in a way, be said about Seagate and Western Digital. On the hard drive market, these two have been 'fighting' over the top position for quite some time. Seagate managed to somehow stay in the lead last year. In the recently ended quarter, however, its HDD sales turned out to be fewer than what WD pulled off. This may point towards the possibility of these two companies' positions being exchanged by the end of the year.
Analysts from the Information Networks have reportedly reached the conclusion that there is a high chance for WD to outsell Seagate in 2010, thus becoming the top HDD supplier worldwide.
This came somewhat close to happening last year, when the former sold 165.2 million HDDs and the latter reached 175.2 million. The gap was then completely eliminated in the first quarter of 2010, when Seagate sold 50.3 million and its rival took the lead with 51.1 million. If WD keeps this up, it should end the year with more sales than the current top player.
"The mobile HDD market, which is WD's strength, will outperform the desktop market, which is Seagate's strength, in 2010," Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network, noted. "That's one of the factors in our forecast that WD will move ahead of Seagate in 2010."
"All the above is based on unit shipments. If we look at the revenue portion, revenues for the latest quarter for both WD and Seagate was the same at US$2.6 billion," Castellano said. "That means that the average WD HDD sold for US$50.88 while Seagate's HDD prices averaged US$51.69. Not too significant."
In 2009, total hard disk sales were of 558 million, of which Seagate held a 31.4% share. The largest sector was that of 3.5-inch desktop units (306 million), dominated by Seagate (43% share compared with WD's 32%). On the other hand, WD was better on the mobile front (28% share), but, since the overall market accounted for less of the total (211 million shipments), Seagate still came out on top overall.