new report from trend focus sheds light on the mechanical storage industry carnage beginning in 2023. The Storage Newsletter shared an excerpt from Trendfocus’ research work covering the largest HDD storage providers, their shipments, and market shares spanning 2022. Shipments have dropped significantly over the past year, with Seagate and WDC shipments nearly halving.
According to this data, the worst market performers are the largest members of the HDD industry triumvirate. Seagate’s HDD shipments dropped 43.7% last year, and WDC was about the same, declining 43.0% over the same period. But Toshiba wasn’t unscathed by 2022. HDD shipments fell in line with its competitors, with shipments down a whopping 39.3% year-on-year.
|
vendor |
1 million HDDs |
Q/Q change |
year-on-year |
market share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
seagate |
15.10 – 15.60 |
-3.9% -0.7% |
-43.7% -41.7% |
42.9 – 42.9% |
|
Toshiba |
7.80 – 8.0 |
-2.6% -0.1% |
-39.3% -37.7% |
22.2% – 22.0% |
|
WDC |
12.30 – 12.80 |
-16.2% -12.7% |
-43.0% -40.7% |
34.9% – 35.2% |
|
total |
35.20 – 36.40 |
-8.3% – 5.2% |
-42.5 -40.5% |
100% |
Industry shipments also fell by 42.5% over the year to about 35 or 36 million units. Naturally, the industry cannot take a hit like this for years until it becomes unsustainable and HDDs are confined to a technology graveyard. However, this is mainly due to destocking and a cooling economy.
In addition to considering overall market trends and the fate of each of the three largest HDD makers, market analysts looked at the three HDD segments separately. Trendfocus believes that the biggest pain point for HDD storage manufacturers today is the declining demand for enterprise cloud storage businesses. A combination of cloud-storage company mergers and destocking has seen the segment “cut near-line shipments in Q4 2022 from 10 million to 11 million units,” he said.
Moving on to 3.5-inch desktop and consumer HDDs, the single-digit percentage drop observed wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t show any encouraging signs of recovery. Sellers of 3.5-inch HDDs had hoped Q4 2022 would see a surge in the surveillance market and an end to the slump in consumer confidence, but neither has materialized.
Finally, 2.5-inch HDD showed a glimmer of light in Q4 with a QoQ rebound of 15%. I doubt there will always be a 4th quarter rebound due to the holiday gift season.
We recently reported that 0.5 terabyte HDDs and SSDs are now priced similarly. In its report, TrendForce (not to be confused with Trendfocus) estimated that 92% of laptops sold in 2022 will have SSDs, and that percentage is expected to rise to 96% by 2023. , delivering very pessimistic news to the laptop HDD industry.
