Shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) went down in the first quarter of 2013 according to a report released by research company Trendfocus. Desktop and consumer electronics 3.5" HDD shipments went slightly down with nearly 1 million less disks shipped than the last quarter of 2012.
That quarter included the holiday season, a time frame in which traditionally more HDDs are sold than in the rest of the year. The price of HDDs dropped with about 4%. It's expected that prices of HDDs won't come down as rapid as before as there are only three independent HDD manufacturers left, meaning less competition.
Together, Seagate, WD and Toshiba sold nearly as much mobile 2.5" HDDs as the quarter before. It was expected that the PC market would grow with the launch of Windows 8, but unfortunately the release of Microsoft's latest operating system has not contributed to a significant growth for hardware vendors, including HDD manufacturer. According to the report they seem to already have hit the bottom of demand for mobile disks. The shipments of mobile HDDs stayed nearly the same as in previous quarters. Also prices of these disks stayed nearly the same.
Like desktop and consumer electronics HDDs, also shipments of enterprise HDDs are traditionally up during the holiday season. In this market shipments were also slightly less and prices of enterprise HDDs went only slightly down. The demand for enterprise HDDs remains strong, mainly due to ongoing demand from cloud datacenters.
When the shipments of desktop, mobile and enterprise of each of the three HDD manufacturers are combined, only Toshiba saw an increase of shipments.
