WD, Seagate Recover From HDD Shipment Shortage

By Douglas Perry
published

Both Seagate and Western Digital have improved their HDD shipments following the disastrous Thailand flood last year.

Seagate's CEO Steven Luczo said that more drives are shipping, but the low-point of supply was not in November as previously believed, but "closer to mid-December".

Seagate shipped 61 million drives in the first quarter (13 percent of which were Samsung drives), up from about 47 million units in Q4 of 2011. Western Digital said it shipped about 44 million drives, up from 28.5 million units in the prior quarter. Seagate's revenue climbed to $4.4 billion, the net income was $1.1 billion WD's revenue was $3.0 billion and net income $483 million. Both companies also recently gained in market capitalization again. Seagate currently stands at about $13.11 billion, while WD is at $9.74 billion.

Luczo told analysts that the HDD industry will continue its current pace of recovery. In Q4 2011, a total of 119 million drives were shipped, while Q1 saw estimated total shipments of about 140 million units.  The total available market (TAM) for Q2 will be 160 million drives, 180 million for Q3 and up to 190 million for Q4, according to Seagate. However, Luczo did not say how many drives Seagate will be able to ship in those quarters. The executive noted that "distribution pricing [of hard drives] remains well above historical spreads" and there remains a "a substantial and growing shortfall in unmet exabyte demand resulting from the supply-chain disruptions caused by the floods."

WD's John Coyne was a bit more optimistic and told analysts that "the recovery activities related to both WD operations and those of [its] supply chain partners impacted by the Thailand floods have reached the point where [the company] now [has] the capability to adequately meet anticipated customer demand in the current quarter and beyond."

Douglas Perry
29 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mrpijey
    Good (even when I know it's partially a lie manipulated by all manufacturers to drive up profit), now take down the prices a notch or two. And improve the quality of your crappy drives as they tend to crash more often than ever.
    Reply
  • captaincharisma
    mrpijeyGood (even when I know it's partially a lie manipulated by all manufacturers to drive up profit), now take down the prices a notch or two. And improve the quality of your crappy drives as they tend to crash more often than ever.
    LMAO ok hot shot then who is the better HDD brand sense apparently you have such bad luck with Seagate and WD unlike the rest of us
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    mrpijeyGood (even when I know it's partially a lie manipulated by all manufacturers to drive up profit), now take down the prices a notch or two. And improve the quality of your crappy drives as they tend to crash more often than ever.Prices are already falling ~$10-20/month on 2TB drives, it will not be long now before we start seeing prices where we are use to seeing them again.
    Reply
  • confish21
    I still think their quality has dropped. Especially seagate. The fail rates are just bs.
    Reply
  • Nakal
    Well therein lies the problem. There used to be a good number of HDD manufacturers (Maxtor, Seagate, IBM, WD, Hitatchi etc..) now it is down to almost 2 (if the most recent merger goes through.)
    Reply
  • Northwestern
    I'll be going for WB, as they have a better rate of failure over Seagate.

    I'll also give it another month to let the prices drop before I ditch my 40GB drives for a terabyte. I "tera-bly" need it!
    Reply
  • bdubdc
    essentially, there are two manufactures of standard 3.5 inch drives... seagate and wd. if they collude, they've got us by the balls.
    Reply
  • wavetrex
    They've already got us by the balls. It's just that most don't realize it yet.
    Reply
  • ubercake
    Can we say all the eggs in one basket?

    I haven't even considered an HDD purchase since I started hearing about this in the news.

    Does everyone realize Thailand floods every year? Not like this every year, but there's definitely risk every year. It's like putting your business on the banks of New Orleans. Is that a risk you'd be willing to take? The insurance companies won't?

    Definitely seems like a last hurrah for the HDD market. They could charge all the OEMs dependent on them quite a few more bucks as consumers backed off directly purchasing the drives. In the meantime, SSDs become more numerous, the production price becomes lower, and in turn the cost to the consumer decreases. Neither Seagate or WD has become a major player in the SSD space. WD made a half-arsed effort early on with prices well beyond the competition, but you don't see their SSDs for sale anywhere these days.

    It's unfortunate because I really trust my WD mechanical drives. I would think they could bring that same quality to the SSD market. Intel has been doing a good job of fulfilling my storage needs since the price of the HDDs skyrocketed. Not as much space as an HDD, but definitely superior performance.
    Reply
  • f-14
    don't care, SSD drives are now starting to fall to less than a dollar per GB. even ASUS has made a special SSD adapter to fit right onto a motherboard header next to the CPU and memory that fits a 120GB SSD card slightly bigger than 2 thumbs. why do i want a big clunky NOISY disc drive any more?
    if all goes well with the design ASUS came up with, we won't need big clunky noisy drives of any kind any more. i see this bluray bit as a last ditch money sucking scheme by the MPAA and RIAA to keep pushing obsolete technology like cpu/gpu makers with all the various modes and slight speed increases and socket changes.
    memory card readers have been around since the early 2000's and yet they are still using discs, .wav and mp3's were the wake up call. youtube is another. we already know who won the battle of disc vs. file media.
    720p=96
    1080p=128
    i haven't d/l or made any file less then 256 since encoders came out, i certainly don't use movies that are less then 1200p with only 8-track 1970's options.
    Reply