History 2000: Disastrous HDD Quarter According to IDC

In the most recent release of IDC’ quarterly report on the HDD drive market in Europe, Middle East and Africa markets, analyst Bob Peyton sounds the alarm with the title: “Disastrous quarter as revenue falls.”

“The decline in shipments and lack of growth, coupled with continuing price declines, resulted in a revenue decline (from last year) of 40% in multi user drives and 21% in desktop PC units,” he writes.

He further estimates that the outlook is not bright, with demand weakness persisting in the second quarter and prices continuing to fall.

Meanwhile, he offers the following résumé of the EMEA optical/removable drive market: “A tough first quarter, as only CD-RW keeps rolling.”

More specifically, he emphasizes the severely constrained shipments of CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and CD-RW products caused by chip shortages as CD/DVD makers vie with mobile phone manufacturers, who pay higher prices and consequently get the lion’s share of factory output.

The situation is hardly better for the European tape drive market, where sales, according to Peyton, fell from $236 million in 4Q99 down to $180 million in 1Q00, and units dropped from 432,000 to 311,000 units. The analyst ascribes the slump here to spending delays in the aftermath of successful, though costly, Y2K preparations.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 149 on June 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.