EMEA External HDD Market Achieves 20% Growth From 2Q10 to 2Q11

The external HDD market experienced strong growth in the EMEA region in Q2 this year, achieving shipments of close to six million units, compared with 4.9 million in Q2 2010, according to a new market tracking report from Futuresource Consulting Ltd.

"During the last quarter there has been a notable year-on-year increase in demand for external HDDs, despite the fallout from the Japanese earthquake, which did result in some supply chain challenges early in Q2," says Mats Larsson, Research Consultant at Futuresource. "These challenges were swiftly overcome and strong demand from emerging markets in Eastern Europe and the Middle East powered the sector to new growth."

Futuresource has been tracking quarterly shipments across the 17 key EMEA countries for two years, covering portable, desktop, multimedia and NAS drive form factors, with shipment and price tracking services that deliver 100% market coverage, including detailed outputs that track sales by country, by brand, by form factor and by quarter.

"We’re seeing a number of distinct trend differences appearing across countries and product sectors," says Larsson, "with very strong growth in Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, in contrast to recent declines in Sweden where the introduction of a new levy has impacted. Denmark has exhibited an even stronger decline as its levy has sharply increased cross border retail from Germany.

"Germany continues to dominate the EMEA market, generating more than 1.1 million shipments in Q2 2011, closely followed by France with the UK in third position. Portable drives – 2.5 inch – continue to outsell desktop drives in all territories, but gains in market share did not match the pace of demand, due to the stronger impact of shortages on this segment. Looking to consumer NAS, the market continues to grow, but at a slower rate than many predicted a year ago."

Moving forward, there are still many opportunities within this market sector and Futuresource forecasts show the external HDD market across EMEA 17 will reach 30 million units shipped by year end 2011.