By Ramdas S
For the first time in several months, storage vendor Seagate saw a drop in the internal hard drive market share. Thus far a reigning numero uno, the vendor was upstaged post a fierce price war by the competition. Currently, the vendor is readying a strategy to regain the lost market share.
“An aggressive pricing strategy from Western Digital, Samsung and Hitachi is the prime reason for market share fluctuation. We are also aware that this has made a dent in our market share. But we refuse to get drawn into the price war,” said Rajesh Khurana, Country Manager, Seagate. “Winning market share on pricing is always short lived. For us, channel profitability is paramount and this is what eventually matters in the long run.”
Despite predictions that the desktop market will play second fiddle to notebooks, Seagate sees the desktop drive market growing at a healthy rate. “In 2010, our overall desktop drive shipments grew despite the dip in the desktop share,” said Khurana. “We continue to see a huge potential going forward. The renewed interest in hardware upgrade would fuel hard drive sales across both desktop and notebook categories. Also, the end-users are increasingly becoming brand conscious and this is likely to play in our favor. The external drive market too is witnessing an accelerated growth.”
Khurana is betting on Seagate’s newly launched products to drive growth in 2011.
“We launched several new products in 2010. These include our new Momentus notebook drives, Black Armour NAS devices, Free Agent and Go Flex external drives, and home entertainment products. We saw bigger acceptance among customers, and we now expect the volumes of these products to grow significantly.” |