Asia/Pacific Hard Disk Drive Market To Grow 26% in 2007, reports IDC

February 28, 2007

Singapore and Hong Kong, February 28, 2007 – In its new report on the Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) hard disk drive market, IDC predicts that 2007 will see the region surpassing 270 million units, a growth of 26% year-on-year.

Desktop PCs are expected to take up 40% of all hard disk drives shipped to the region, followed by notebooks at 29%. The growth of hard disk drives in consumer electronics (CE) will continue to be fueled by hard disk drive-based digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top boxes.

While DVRs were already the mainstay of the CE hard disk drive market in 2006, this market is still poised for tremendous growth ahead, given their declining prices, and the current low adoption rate for them in homes outside of North America and Europe. Game consoles with built-in hard disk drives, like the Playstation 3, will also bolster the CE market's growth in 2007.

"Changes in Internet use and consumer habits have also been key to the growth in the hard disk drive market. For example, the proliferation of portable music players and digital music has created the need for much larger music libraries among users," said Nur Hayati Ali, Market Analyst of Asia/Pacific Personal Systems Research at IDC. "Regardless of whether the players are flash or hard-disk drive based, these music libraries have stoked the consumer's appetite for bigger hard disk drive capacities in their PCs, as well as external storage drives in order to store, backup, and move these files.“

In geographical terms, China and Hong Kong will continue to absorb the bulk of hard disk drives shipped to the region in 2007, and this is followed by Korea, and Taiwan. Most of the drives will go to the OEMs and ODMs in China and Taiwan, who assemble and build most of the world's PCs and consumer electronics. Meanwhile, India's growing local PC manufacturing and distribution industry will also gradually increase the country's role in the Asia/Pacific hard disk drive market.

The report entitled “Asia/Pacific Hard Disk Drive 2006–2010 Forecast and Analysis” (Doc#AP1071IDN) provides a comprehensive view of the current situation and future outlook of the Asia/Pacific hard disk drive industry. The market is broken up by key regions/countries, as well as different channels available to vendors including OEMs, ODMs, MNCs, and distributors. The study also presents market highlights in the region, application forecasts, as well as profiles of the various vendors in this space.

For more information about purchasing the research, please contact Selina Ang at +65-6829-7717 or sang@idc.com. For press enquiries, please contact Holly Fung at +852-2905-4225 or hfung@idc.com.

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