Floods in Thailand badly affected the hard drive industry last year but according to market research company IDC the industry is likely to be back on track during 2012.
The floods caused a big imbalance in supply and demand and were responsible for a decline of sales of 4.5 percent during 2011. However, during 2012, IDC thinks production will return to the right putput levels and show a unit shipment growth of 7.7 percent.
If the vendors manage to create hybrid solid state hard drives, the industry could be worth $50 billion by 2015 with a 2011-2016 CAGR of 8.6 percent.
John Rydning, research VP at IDC said the industry needs to re-invent itself. “Long term revenue growth will only be realised if the remaining participants tranform into storage device and storage solution suppliers with a broad range of products for a wide variety of markets.”
HDDs for the PC market will show a decline over the next five years – the real growth will demand from personal storage, entry level storage and enterprise applications, he said. “This reflects the broader trend to store more content in large data centres and centralised storage devices in the home or in small businesses.”
HDDs also face a fight with solid state drives in the notebook PC market, but pricing is too high for widespread adoption. IDC believes the vendors will have to create hybrid devices – they’re more cost effective.
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