History (1994) IDC 1993 Tape Market Outlook: Non-Traditional High Growth

The tape market in 1993 continued its non-traditional high growth. Individual technology results were influenced more by company reorganizations and redirection than by product strengths and weaknesses.

The PC system segment continues to control expansion of the tape drive market, with tape drive volumes benefiting from increased penetration and continued PC shipment growth.

The leading tape drive vendors are those that support this segment in a major way.

• 1994 will again be a high unit growth year, with many drive manufacturers facing major challenges.
• WW tape market (units) grew 26.7% to 3.7 million drives.
• WW ‘if sold OEM’ revenue increased by 6.2% to $1.9 billion. ape drive penetration of PCs reached 8.9%.
• DC 2000 again exceeded growth expectations with a market size of 2.2 million drives.
• Forecasted 1994 market size of 4.5 million drives (up 19.5%), with an ‘if sold OEM’ revenue of $1.9 billion (up 6.9%).

Overall, 1993’s tape drive unit and revenue growth performed extremely well when compared to other industry indicators (i.e., the Winchester disk drive market).

Looking to 1994, IDC expects another good unit growth year with price wars continuing to be more aggressive than the tape industry norm of several years ago.

Assuming a recovery in other segments of the industry, we believe there will a resumption of the acquisition activity that was abruptly halted in early 1993.

Also, 1994 is expected to be the year that mid-range tape automation comes of age.

We believe there will be a significant number of product announcements at the OEM and end-user levels – comprising new software, new hardware, and new vendors.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 76, published on May 1994.