Strong Surge in Mobile Class Fuels Growth in 3Q08 EMEA HDD Market

According to data released by IDC EMEA, the EMEA market for hard disk drives (HDD) grew 6.4% to 33.6 million units in the third quarter of 2008, driven by the mobile and enterprise segments. Desktop sales were flat in 3Q08 compared with 3Q07.

Drive Class

• In the desktop-class drive area, the largest segment of the HDD market, shipments contracted 0.4% to 23.3 million. Seagate remained the largest vendor at 48% of units shipped, growing at 10% year on year.
• Mobile-class drives (aimed at small form factors such as notebooks and consumer devices) continued to drive market growth at over 30% year on year to 7.9 million units. Western Digital remained the largest vendor, growing 79% on the same quarter of the previous year with more than 3 million units.
• Enterprise-class drives (premium drives destined for high-end disk arrays) grew 12% year on year to 2.5 million units. The largest vendor in enterprise was Seagate with 1.5 million units, growing 5% year on year.

"As economic conditions worsened in the third quarter, the HDD market saw a shift from desktop to mobile class drives compared to a year ago" said Claus Egge, program director for IDC’s EMEA HDD research. "The mobile segment showed solid growth, primarily due to strong demand from notebooks. In the enterprise segment, growth exceeded our expectations slightly, reflecting increased demand from IT datacenters as they accommodate their internal and external customers’ data requirements."

Routes to Market
During the quarter, the local OEM channel (smaller native EMEA players) experienced the highest growth at 11.7% year on year to 8.6 million units, followed by the distribution channel, which grew a healthy 7% to 16.3 million units. The global OEM channel (EMEA-based sites of global IT manufacturers and assemblers) was in third place with 0.6% to 8.5 million units. "Growth in the PC market benefited the local OEM category," said Jimena Sisa, senior research analyst for IDC’s EMEA HDD research. "The strong growth in the local OEM channel was primarily due to the many manufacturers in EMEA assembling external HDDs or building set-top boxes, and the weak growth in the global OEM is an indication of the financial situation, with companies delaying purchasing decisions."

Capacity Points and RPMs
Drives with 160GB capacity were the most popular, with more than 8 million units shipped, representing 25.3% of the total 3Q08 HDD units. The 7,200rpm speed dominated with almost 22 million 3.5in. units shipped, which represents over 88% of this segment. Drives with 250GB capacity showed the second highest volume with 15.5% of total 3Q08 HDD shipments. The high-capacity 1TB units increased more than 100% from 670,000 units in 2Q08 to 1.353 million units in 3Q08.