Market for Hard Drives in Middle East

[Magnus]

Business 24-7 has an interview with Didier Trassaert, senior director for branded products for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Western Digital. I picked out two questions:

How is appetite for hard drives in the Middle East growing?
There are about 250,000 hard drives sold a quarter in the Middle East, generating revenue of approximately $26m. The average price is between $100 and $120, so the size of the market is about $30m per quarter. A year, this is currently $120m, and by 2009 it will double to at least $240m. The worldwide number sold is approximately 500 million drives a year. On average, global growth is about 50 per cent a year, so the Middle East is well ahead of this.
In the Europe, Middle East and Africa region there were about 6.5 million units sold in the second quarter. This is expected to rise to more than eight million this quarter and in the fourth quarter, more than 10 million. Our market share here is around 50 per cent, and in the Europe, Middle East and Africa, we are about 22 per cent. In the Middle East, you have Western Digital and Seagate that control around 85 per cent of the market. In Europe, market share is much more fragmented.

What’s the extent of lost data in the region?
Disaster recovery companies charge a lot for their services. I had a friend whose drive crashed and wanted to recover the data. The drive itself cost $300, but the company wanted to charge him $9,000 to recover the data. Also, as a company, Western Digital has the lowest warrantee costs in the industry, which means we have high reliability levels on our drives.