WW HDD Year-Over-Year Shipments Growth Rate Declined for the Third Straight Quarter

Overall, 2008 will be another record year for worldwide HDD shipments and revenue, according to an IDC‘s presentation, Worldwide Hard Disk Drive Quarterly Update: 3Q08 Summary and Outlook, by John Rydning, Research Director, Hard Disk Drives.

Despite a challenging economy, worldwide HDD shipments demonstrated strong 15% sequential growth from 2Q08 and 13% year-over-year growth in 3Q08. However, HDD year-over-year shipment growth rates declined for the third straight quarter. IDC expects that trend to continue into 2009.

The capacity sweetspot for desktop 3.5inch and mobile 2.5inch HDDs remains at 160GB. More than 40 million 160GB HDDs in all form factors shipped, representing 28% of total 3Q08 HDD shipments. 250GB had the next highest volume of total HDD shipments.

1TB HDD shipments exceeded 5 million units in 3Q08.

Strong HDD shipments helped to offset aggressive ASP erosion.

Overall HDD market share positions in 3Q08 were relatively unchanged from 2Q08, except for Toshiba which gained share in the mobile 2.5in HDD segment.

1H09 Outlook
Demand for HDDs in the first half of 2009 will decline due to typical seasonality, but will decline more significantly than historical trends due to an expected down-turn in IT and consumer spending. Given the change in the macroeconomic and IT spending growth rate assumptions, IDC lowered its HDD shipment forecast by more than 35 million units from 4Q08 through 3Q09.