WW HDD Shipments Fall Below 40 Million in 3Q22, Around -41% to -43% Y/Y

Here is an abstract of a report, SDAS: HDD Information Service, Preliminary CQ3 ’22 Quarterly Update, October 6, 2022, by Trendfocus, Inc.

HDD Shipments Fall Below 40 Million on Weak End Demand, High Inventories and Cloud Component Shortages

3.5″/2.5″ enterprise HDDs: With a prolonged burn-down of previously purchased inventory by system OEMs and weakening US hyperscale demand caused primarily by severe system level component shortages, total enterprise HDD shipments fell approximately 15% sequentially to the low-to-mid-17-million-unit mark. Nearline units dropped to the low-to-mid-15-million range, although a strong capacity mix increase with significantly lower mid-capacity models shipping to OEMs combined with a solid move to>18TB HDDs by cloud companies to result in 250EB of capacity shipped, off just a few percentage points Q/Q. Performance enterprise reflected OEM end-demand weakness, falling to around 2.0 million units in 3CQ22.
3.5″ desktop/CE HDDs: Total 3.5″ desktop/CE HDD shipments (including 3.5″ external and branded surveillance HDDs) dropped to approximately the mid-12-million-unit mark with essentially weakness in all client 3.5″ markets. The sequential reduction represented a decline of between 10% and 15%.
2.5″ mobile/CE HDDs: Shipments suffered shipment reductions in the 10% to 15% range sequentially as well in 4CQ22, to around 8.5 to 9.0 million units. It bears pointing out that weakness in the PC market had only a minor impact on this category as the vast majority of notebook PCs have already migrated to SSDs. The Q/Q reduction in 2.5″ mobile/CE HDDs was largely attributed to weak retail external HOD and niche 2.5″ CE sales given a drop in spending due to economic slowing.

3Q22 WW HDD shipments