Once More HDS Disagrees With Our Figures

It’s not the first time that HDS disagrees with the figures we are publishing on the company.

We have received this email from Bastiaan van Amstel Senior Manager, Corporate Communications, EMEA,
Hitachi Data Systems:

"Yesterday, I’ve read your article on the Top-Ten Storage Companies in the World. I would like to respond to this article as some of the numbers that are mentioned for HDS are incorrect.

"In the article you state that HDS+Japan FY09 consolidated revenue is 4,149 billion US$ – this number is wrong, as the actual number is 3,280 billion US$.

"We haven’t announced our FY10 revenue (this will happen on May 11th), so I wonder where you got the 3,710 billion US$ from. If you would like to keep this as a reference though, and correct the FY09 revenue with the number that I provided, HDS+Japan shows growth rather than a decline.

"Could you please correct the number in your article?"

Our answer:

"I have to say that the way Hitachi is publishing its financial figures for its storage activity is one of the most complicated in the world and it’s a lot of work to understand and analyze them on the PDFs published quarterly on hitachi.com’s web site.

"For storage subsystems:
1/ There is HDS and there are also storage systems sold in Japan under the Hitachi name (not HDS).
2/ The fiscal year of Hitachi ends March 31 (and December 31 for HGST…). About all the companies in the world agree to name FY11 when the end of fiscal year is a month in calendar year 2011. Not Hitachi. It is FY10.
3/ In the results of Hitachi there is a line for Storage*7 (Figures for storage include disk array subsystems, etc.), and another one Storage solutions. What’s the difference? Nobody knows, and the figures are different on the two lines for revenues.

"For my report I took the highest figures (Storage Solutions). You can thank me.

"As written in my report, I took for FY09 and FY10 figures the fiscal year ending in calendar year 2009 and 2010 respectively (which means FY08 and FY09 for Hitachi).

"For these periods, it’s respectively 340 and 304 billion of yens for Hitachi Storage Solutions. Maybe you can discuss the currency change that I applied, but I took the same one for the two years to keep the same growth rate (-11%).

"Where do you get US$3,280 million?, you are asking for. It’s probably the same figure as mine ($3,710 million) with another slightly different currency change for 304 billion of yens. But, on my side, I ask: where did you find that it was an increase figure compared to the former year? Note that the forecast from Hitachi for its Storage Solutions is 292 billions of yens for its official FY10 ending in March 2011, once more down, this time by 4%. I wait for the final figures hoping for you that the company’s forecast is wrong.

"In the future, I will be glad to receive directly the financial results of HDS each quarter (maybe from you?), not being obliged to waste my time with the complicated official financial reports of Hitachi.

"About each time I meet people from HDS, they tell me that HDS is growing. It does not correspond to the official figures of the parent company. Even HDS is not anymore listed on its IDC Top 5 list since 2009 for storage systems (but, I agree, IDC does not include your OEM activity, a shrinking market as you know), and no more for storage software.

"Other research firm Gartner put Hitachi/HDS on the fifth place in 2010 in the world for External Controller-Based Disk Storage with a 21.2% growth from 2009 to 2010. I presume that these numbers were given by HDS USA itself to the research company which could do a better job looking like me at the official figures published by Hitachi."