Toshiba to Expand HDD Production

While hard drive sales on a unit basis have continued to decline, the drop hasn't been consistent across all segments of the market. In particular, high capacity drives for hyperscalers and other hosts continue to be a hot commodity, as their data storage needs continue to grow and there are few other alternatives. As such, Toshiba has announced that the company will actually be increasing its HDD production capacity, expanding one of its plants in Philippines to increase output of high-end helium-filled enterprise and nearline HDDs. The company is confident of its roadmap (and growing demand for its products) which includes numerous promising products and technologies.

The overall broad shift in HDD demand from lower capacity client to high capacity nearline drives comes as Toshiba finds itself on the outside looking in. The company’s sales mix is dominated by client HDDs, with enterprise drives accounting for about a third of it. So while Toshiba controls about 36% of the global mobile HDD shipments, it only has around 17% of the enterprise/nearline market. As a result, Toshiba is looking to make changes to capture more of the nearline market.

At its Investors Day last month, Toshiba outlined plans to radically increase the share of enterprise/nearline HDDs in its product mix in FY2021 (starts on April 1, 2021), shifting away from client drives and towards nearline drives. Overall, the company set itself a goal to capture an ‘over 20%’ share of the global enterprise/nearline HDD market while maintaining its share of the client HDD market at around 25%