NEW DELHI: On his first visit to India, Samsung Electronics, CEO-Storage, Jin
Kyun Choi, re-affirmed the company's top position in the distribution of Hard
Disk Drives (HDD). With sales of over 1.5 million units of storage devices in
year 2001, Samsung is planning to install another 2 million storage solutions by
end-2002.
Samsung was the first manufacturer to launch the 15Gb/Platter and the
20Gb/Platter technologies in India. Today, though its mainline product is the
40Gb/Platter technology, it is looking at launching the 60Gb/platter technology
very soon.
Samsung claims that it has over 65 per cent market share in the Optical
Drives segment (CD/DVD ROMs/CDRW/COMBO) and is number one in the distribution of
HDD. "Our success has been because of our commitment to the Indian market.
We are entering a market driven model and therefore more of our focus is
customer centric now," said Choi. In HDD and Optical Disk Drives (ODD)
storage components the company is targeting an increase in sales of upto Rs
1,350 crore by 2002.
In its plans for year 2002 the company is looking forward to promoting
7200rpm drives which occupy 35 per cent of the global market. Currently in
India, 7200rpm drives occupy only 5 per cent of the market. The current market
standard in India is still at 5400rpm and with the growing use of PC as an
entertainment device 7200rpm is expected to become a critical component. The
company also intends to take the service of HDDs to another 14 cities by the
year-end. And for ODDs it will increase its presence to over 70 cities from its
current 39.
The need for larger capacity HDDs is driven by 3-D gaming, digital and video
and advanced technologies. The company has witnessed the fastest growth in HDD
for the last 10 years. The company has launched many innovative products like
the Combo (optical) drive and regularly presents the best Time-To-Market (TTM)
in the magnetic storage line.
Worldwide Samsung is planning to ship 25 million units by 2002, an increase
of 5 million units over the last year figure of 20 million units. Samsung's
latest offering for the mobile storage market is Handy-Q.