History (1996): Hitachi Wants to Be Top 5 HDD Maker

If you counted all the companies that want to rank among the top 5 HDD drive manufacturers of the world by the year 2000, you’d quickly find that there are considerably more aspirants than places available. Attaining this goal may nonetheless be easier than it seems, given the number of players currently dropping out of the race altogether.

Hitachi is one firm that has chosen to invest heavily in HDDs, as well as in CD-ROMs.

With its expertise in MR head technology which is only matched by that of IBM, the Japanese company has what it takes, but until now has been somewhat lacking in marketing drive, particularly in Europe, contenting itself instead with the domestic market.

But all this is changing, given the workload of its huge Filipino plant. There, Hitachi churns out 60,000 2.5-inch HDDs per month, 25% of which ship to Japan, 25% to the US, 25% to Europe and the remaining 25% throughout AsiaPac, including Australia.

Hitachi estimates its current hold on the German HOD market for 2.5-inch drives at 45%, thanks to such OEMs as Escom and Vobis.

But the company additionally has started out with an attractive line of 3.5-inch models with SCSI interface. A move to IDE is in the works as production capacity increases.

The Philippines plant, which has already cost $150 million, now has the capacity to produce 3 million drives per year with a building designed to allow a four-fold expansion.

A huge effort has also been directed at sales of 5.25-inch magneto-optical units and above all CD-ROM drives manufactured in the company’s Yokohama and Gifu works in Japan. The idea here is to become one of the top three worldwide suppliers, taking on Mitsumi and Panasonic. Hitachi dropped all development activities on 6X drives in order to move directly to 8X, like many other companies, with evaluation units available by 2Q96. Hitachi has also definitively ceased all operations in 12-inch WORM disks and drives.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 98, published on March 1996.

Note: WD acquired HDD manufacturer Hitachi GST in 2012, 6 years later, for $4.8 billion.