Top 10 WW Storage Companies in 2014

Note: This article was largely corrected on March 10, 2015,  especially following changes on IBM figures.

Growth of global revenue of biggest storage companies continue to increase. For our annual Top 10 it was 5% from 2012 to 2013, 9% from 2013 to 2014. But excluding Without Micron, in different storage activity, the percentage is much lower: 0%. Other giants are competing with a lot of more active smaller firms and mainly start-ups with more innovative storage hardware and software.

EMC continues to be #1 in storage. It’s the case since 2004 but with a tiny growth in 2014 (2% vs. 5% for the former year), It’s a similar trend for rival NetApp at 0% in 2014 and 2% in 2013.

It’s worth for HP (-5%), and more dramatic for IBM (-12%) falling from fifth position in 2012 to the ninth one in 2014.

The only firm doing a good job in storage software and systems is Hitachi with sales up yearly 16% but on a yen basis.

As usually firms offering storage and servers but Hitachi, were once more the big losers from 2013 to 2014 including Dell , IBM  and HP. Note that we couldn’t get the results of Dell not being anymore public but we suspect this company is continuing to struggle in storage.

LSI was at $2.4 billion last year. It was acquired for $6.6 billion by Avago that stated its enterprise storage business represented $867 million in FY14 ended November 2014.

Two hard disk drive companies continue to integrate the top of the list, WD leading in front of Seagate since 2013 and both of them registering lower revenue for FY14. The acquisition of Xyratex by Seagate for $814 million didn’t change its ranking. HDD activity is going to stabilize or even to decline in the future

The firms involved in flash are doing well. SanDisk continues to grow,  7% in 2014. On top of that Micron is  the big winner of the year, booming with global revenue up an impressive 80% in 2014 and consequently getting here the second place of our ranking, not so far from EMC and beating WD and Seagate, even if the business is far to be the same.

Another fast growing firm to follow is SK hynix with global annual revenue at $17.1 billion, a figure higher than EMC, being in NAND flash and in many other activities not at all in storage (computing and graphics memory, CMOS, etc.)

All Top 10 companies below record more than $2 billion in revenue.