Hard disk drive (HDD) makers Western Digital and Seagate have announced their financial results for the third quarter and both makers are seeing their PC business revenue contributions weaken. PC HDDs only contributed about 34% of Western Digital's revenues, while Seagate's non-PC storage solution revenue contributions will also rise from 37% in 2010 to 57% in 2015.
Beside the PC HDD storage products, Western Digital and Seagate have also been aggressively pushing their enterprise, surveillance, datacenter and cloud computing storage applications.
China-based Tsinghua Unigroup, via its subsidiary, has recently spent US$3.8 billion acquiring 40 million shares or a 15% stake in Western Digital at US$92.5 per share and is currently the largest shareholder of the HDD maker. Western Digital then has in turn announced a US$19 billion deal acquiring SanDisk to enhance its competitiveness in the solid state drive (SSD) industry. The acquisition is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2016.
Seagate has also been improving its SSD technology and is looking to further reduce its HDD costs to make HDD's average pricing only one tenth of that of SSD in order to boost demand.
Currently, Seagate's overall HDD shipments are still weaker than those of Western Digital, but for the notebook application, Seagate's shipments in the third quarter were five million units more than those of Western Digital. To maintain its leadership in the notebook industry, Seagate has already planned a 1TB ultra-thin hard drive with a thickness of only 0.7mm for 2016.
For non-PC applications, Seagate also recently unveiled its new 8TB hard drive designed specifically for surveillance purposes.
Following Western Digital's acquisition of HGST in China, Seagate's merger of Samsung's HDD business was also approved by China's Ministry of Commerce at the end of October and is expected to help lower Seagate's operation costs in China.
