Seagate surges ahead in India

Iishwar Daas Nair

DUBAI: Disc drive manufacturer Seagate's outlook on the Indian market remains positive and encouraging, despite fierce competition from vendors like Samsung, Maxtor, and Western Digital amongst others. A recent AC Nielsen study revealed that Seagate led the hard disc drive market in India with more than 60 percent market share (in terms of units) for the personal and enterprise storage market segments in the second quarter of 2004.

Against the backdrop of the June announcement of 12 new products that claimed to address 97 percent of the total available market for disc drives, Seagate followed up in late July with the announcement that all its internal drives in the distribution and retail channels would be covered by a 5-year warranty program, a new standard in the market.

Explaining Seagate's stand on the 5-year warranty program, Sharad Shrivastava, country manager, Seagate India, said "There was a deep-felt need for higher warranty for a critical systems building-block like disc drives. And with Seagate's quality, we had the confidence to support such a program." Added B.S. Teh , vice president and managing director, Seagate Asia Pacific, " It also gave us an opportunity to exhibit our aggressive posturing in the market." None of the other vendors have followed up with a similar announcement.

The slew of new product announcements in June included the first enterprise class 2.5-inch drive — 'Savvio', which is very different from the mobile product (Momentus). Others included an array of new products last month, targeting new applications such as Near On-line storage — for which, the company announced the industry's first half-a-tera byte external hard drives with (500GB) disc drive. Also included were portable external hard drives (with upto 100GB) capacity and the world's first pocket external hard drives a 5GB 1-inch hard drive for hand held applications.

Outlining product trends, Teh said, " One of the major trends that we foresee in the near future is the wider adoption of Serial ATA from Parallel ATA. It is also anticipated that smaller form factor disc drives (2.5 inch) will start finding favor in the desktop space".

An emerging market for Seagate is the consumer electronics segment- gaming, audio players and broadcasting (set top boxes, PVR etc). Though a small opportunity in the Indian context, the global market for HDDs in this segment is said to be growing at a CAGR of over 40 percent.