History (1991): Declined WW Revenue in 1991 for HDDs

The rigid disk drive industry will generate worldwide revenues of $24.3 billion in 1991, according to the recently released 1991 Disk/ Trend (Mountain View, CA) report ($1,870) on rigid disk drives, a decline of 5.1% from 1990’s total.

The drop in rigid disk drive total revenues is the first recorded in the report’s fifteen year history, but not all segments of the industry share the same fate.

Overall revenues for captive disk drives, those made by computer system manufacturers and sold with their systems, are expected to decline 8.4% in 1991.

Also forecasted to drop are disk drives sold through distribution and through plug compatible resellers, down 8.7%.

In contrast, a 6.5% increase is expected in 1991 for OEM drives, those sold by drive manufacturers to system manufacturers.

Severe price competition has hurt profitability for drive manufacturers, but growth markets for drives used in notebook computers, file servers and workstations will boost overall 1991 unit shipments of non-captive drives by 8.1%.–

The report predicts that WW unit shipments for all types of rigid drives in 1991 will top 30 million drives for the first time.

Here are other highlights:
* The rigid drive industry is expected to return to a pattern of revenue growth in 1992, reaching $28.2 billion in 1994. The WW unit shipment total for 1994 is placed at 43.3 million drives, with drives in the 60-100MB range capturing a dominant share, with 17 million drives.
* Desktop and laptop personal computers have given 3.5-inch drives, a major lead over other drive configurations in 1991 with 76% of the total for all rigid disk drives, but inroads by new smaller disk drives will cut the share for 3.5-inch drives to 49% in 1994. Notebook computers have given 2.5-inch drives a fast start, with 3.9 million drives forecasted for 1991, jumping to 16.9 million in 1994, for 39% of the industry total.
* The new 1.8-inch disk drives starting to ship in late 1991 will be widely used in sub-notebook computers, offering advantages in size and lower power consumption, with shipments climbing to 3.7 million drives in 1994.
* Non-captive revenues for rigid disk drives were $9.1 billion in 1990, with Seagate solidly in the lead, holding 28.9% of the WW total. Conner Peripherals jumped to 14.6% of the non-captive total, boosted by leadership in 2.5- inch HDDs combined with continued strong shipments of 3.5-inch drives. Fujitsu’s non captive drive shipments to OEMs and the plug compatible market for mainframe computers captured an 8.7% share.

The report also contains basic product specs on 794 disk drives and profiles on the 57 existing manufacturers, plus start-up firms and recent industry dropouts.

Magnetic rigid disk drives disk diameter summary
(WW shipments in thousand of units)

Magnetic rigid disk drives
(WW shipments in million of dollars )

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠46, published on November 1991.