History (1991): WW Revenue of Optical Disc Drives to Top $3.6 Billion in 1994

Shipments of optical disk drives have now entered a sustained growth phase, despite a much slower start than drive manufacturers originally expected, defying the 1990/1991 business recession.

Average worldwide revenue growth for optical disk drives will exceed 40% per year in the 1990 to 1994 period, according to the recently published 1991 report on optical disk drives ($1,430) by Disk/Trend, Inc. (Mountain View, CA).

Many applications for optical disk drives are now growing, with the highest increases projected for small erasable drives used with personal computers and read-only CD-ROM drives used with computer games and specialized workstations.

With the expansion of optical drive shipments for these and other applications, libraries used to automate optical disk handling will achieve more than 35% average annual growth in revenues during the 5-year period covered by the report.

Wor1dwide shipments of more than 34,000 optical disk libraries of all types are forecasted for 1994.

Other highlights from the report:

• The fastest growth rates are being achieved by R/W drives with capacities below 1GB, especially by erasable (rewritable) drives. Worldwide shipments of erasable drives in this group are now four times greater than the older write-once types, with average growth during 1990-94 forecasted at more than 100% per year. 1994 erasable drive shipments are estimated at 1.3 million drives, with PCs expected to use 44.8% of all 1994 shipments of drives in the group. Although volume shipments of 3.5-inch drives are just starting in 1991, rapid growth is forecasted, with worldwide shipments of more than 600,000 3.5-inch drives expected in 1994.
• Optical disk libraries, sometimes called jukeboxes because of the automated mechanisms used to load and unload disks, have become a key influence in optical drive shipment growth. Although less than 11,000 libraries were shipped in 1990, the total is expected to jump to almost 32,000 in 1994, with most of the increase coming from CD-ROM libraries used to provide multiple disk selection for personal computers and from libraries of small erasable disks used with specialized network file servers.
• 1990’s worldwide shipments of 712,000 CD-ROM drives is expected to jump to over 3 million drives in 1994, boosted by availability of lower priced drives and new multimedia applications. Computer games are expected to absorb almost 34% of 1994 worldwide shipments, followed by PCs with 30% of the total.
• 1990 shipments of drives with capacities less than 1GB were dominated by Sony, with 50.4% of the worldwide total. In 1990 CD-ROM shipments, Sony led the industry with 29.9% of the worldwide total, but Hitachi was close behind with 29.8%.

The report also contains basic product specs on 142 optical disk drives and 73 optical disk libraries. Profiles are provided on 58 manufacturers of optical disk drives and libraries, including 19 headquartered in USA, 32 in Asia and 7 in Europe.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠45, published on October 1991.