88 to 89 Million HDDs Shipped in 4Q18, -15%/-16% Y/Y - Trendfocus

In its SDAS: HDD Information Service, Preliminary CQ4 ’18 Quarterly Update, published on January 8, 2019, analysts’ company Trendfocus, Inc. wrote:

PRELIMINARY CQ4 ’18 Results:
HDD Shipments Drop to 88 to 89 Million
with Desktop/CE, Mobile/CE and Nearline Falling Q-Q

• 3.5″ Desktop/CE HDDs: Total desktop/CE HDD shipments (including 3.5″ external HDDs) in the range of 27.5 million due to weakening desktop PC demand exiting CQ4 ’18 and lower surveillance shipments.
• 2.5″ Mobile/CE HDDs: Gaming dipped less than seasonal norms but increasing SSD attach rates in notebooks drove most of the reductions in total 2.5″ mobile/CE HDD demand in CQ4, with shipments landing in the range of 44 to 45 million units.
• 3.5″/2.5″ Enterprise HDDs: Consumption of previously purchased capacity by cloud/hyperscale companies weighed heavily on nearline HDD demand in CQ4 ’18 with units falling to just over 11 million HDDs. Performance enterprise shipments lifted slightly to around 5.5 million units, driven by seasonal end-of-year IT equipment purchases of OEM servers and storage.

Final shipments to be published in CQ4’18 Quarterly Update and Executive Summary may change measurably.

4CQ18 preliminary WW HDD shipments

Vendor	HDDs in million	Q/Q growth	Y/Y growth	Market share
Seagate	36.50 – 37.00	-8.5% / -7.2%	-8.0% / -6.7%	41.6% – 41.5%
Toshiba	21.00 – 21.50	-10.6% / -8.5%	-7.9% / -5.7%	23.9% – 24.1%
WDC	30.25 – 30.75	-11.3% / -9.9%	-28.5% / -27.3%	34.5% – 34.5%
TOTAL	87.75 – 89.25	-10.0% / -8.4%	-16.2% / -14.8%	100% – 100%

88 to 89 Million HDDs Shipped in 4Q18, -15%/-16% Y/Y – Trendfocus

Seagate -7%/-8%, WD -27%/-28.5%, Toshiba -15%/-16%