14 DAY TRIAL // Western Digital may have managed to overcome Seagate and become leading HDD maker in the entire world, but it only managed to oust it my a couple of percentage points, something that will change once the Hitachi acquisition is completed.
Some end-users may have heard of the recent bomb dropped by Western Digital, the one about how it is going to completely acquire Hitachi.
Apparently, the outfit is not satisfied with just a small margin of leadership, so it is paying the latter a monstrous sum of $4.3 billion.
Understandably, market research firm iSuppli made haste to see just what this all means for the segment as a whole and for Seagate, WD's rival, in particular.
As consumers may remember, Hitachi deals in both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard disk drives, which can have SATA or SAS interfaces and used in the consumer and particularly the enterprise market.
With WD not really doing much for enterprises itself, this will be a major boost to its business.
“The enterprise HDD market garners significantly higher margins than the consumer segment, which makes the enterprise a fast-growing market for HDD revenue,” said iSuppli analyst Fang Zhang.
“To date, WDC has largely been absent from the enterprise segment. However, Hitachi GST brings WDC the essential technology, product portfolio and experience required to compete in the enterprise segment.”
Basically, this will leave WD with a market share of 49.6 percent of all global HDD shipments (based on fourth quarter totals).
This means that Western Digital will have a share 20.2% higher than the one Seagate can brag about at the moment, not just 2% higher.
“Hitachi GST offers both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch HDDs with SATA and SAS interfaces, which are used extensively in the enterprise segment. The company has wide-ranging experience in this area, giving it the kind of track record required to win the confidence of enterprise customers,” added the analyst.