Following Seagate, Western Digital has apparently recovered from the impact of the Thailand flood as well. As of Q2, the company has become the leading hard drive maker again.
According to IHS, the company built about 71.0 million HDDs during the quarter, ahead of Seagate, which manufactured 65.9 million devices. WD's revenue was $4.8 billion, while Seagate posted $4.5 billion of sales.
“Western Digital lost its No. 1 unit shipment ranking to Seagate in the fourth quarter of 2012 after flooding in Thailand damaged its HDD manufacturing facility,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. “The company now has fully recovered from the disaster, allowing it to sharply increase shipments of HDDs for notebook PCs, up 28 percent from the first quarter. Western Digital is on track to retain the top spot in shipments and revenue for the third quarter.”
WD held a 45 percent market share in Q2, followed by Seagate with 42 percent. The distance to the only other remaining HDD maker, Toshiba, has grown as the company's production dropped from 20.6 million to 20.1 million drives and the market share declined to 13 percent.
Price fixing happened
Price fixing happened
The article says that WD's production has recovered, not prices. Seagate never had a production problem in the traditional sense - they simply had to pick up the slack in the market left by WD. It'll take a while for prices to return to where they used to be because the supply deficit in the market has to even out, and then the previous oversupply builds up again (provided a traditional cycle persists).
I think it should be "in the fourth quarter of 2011", we are not yet in the 4th quarter of 2012
Haha, you beat beat me. I was confused about the "fourth quarter" comment as well.
Pffft, I remember 2TB hard drives for $79 dollars just a few days before this fiasco.
Is it asking too much for these articles to be proofread? I mean isn't Wolfgang supposed to be a 'professional journalist'?
western digital 3tb is available locally here for $150. on par with your $50/tb
i need the 4tb so i can replace all 5 hdds i have in use currently, and have some left over space.
still though, its nice to know that other hdds are getting lower in price.