History (1997): Mega HDD Facility of Seagate in Singapore

Seagate officially opened the world’s largest HDD drive manufacturing plant in Singapore: one-million-square-feet, production capability of 50,000 drives per day, employment capacity of 20,000 people.

Al Shugart finally overcame his reluctance about Singapore, due to Seagate’s rival Singapore Technologies competition.

The new plant in Ang Mo Kio represents an investment of $135 million in fixed assets.

It is presently building drives including 23.4GB 5.25-inch Elite 23 and the 2.1GB 3.5-inch Medialist 2132, the first unit designed by Seagate in Singapore.

Until now, the company owned 4 disk drive plants in the island which are consolidated in the new site. It was Seagate who, 15 years ago, was the first HDD manufacturer to settle in Singapore.

Out of the roughly 100 million drives manufactured to date by the company, 67 million were shipped from Singapore which accounts for over 55% of its current disk drive revenues.

Seagate’s total fixed assets investment in Singapore is now $1.1 billion.

At the present time, the firm employs 19,000 people in this country, in operations including an R&D center, PCBA operations, recording media manufacturing, AsiaPac sales, marketing and customer service organizations.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 108, published on January 1997.

Note: On August 2009, Seagate closed its HDD plant in Singapore.