ANALYSIS: Top 12 Storage Companies in 2012

EMC, Seagate and WD only ones above $10 billion

EMC continues to be ≠1 in storage. It's the case since 2004.

The big change for 2012 results of the acquisition of Hitachi GST by WD and Samsung HDD business by Seagate. Last year, we expected that Seagate will surpass WD, but it will happen in this year.

Seagate was down 8% in 2012 and up 36% in 2012. It's respectively -3% and 31% for WD. EMC grew more slowly, from 13% to 6%.

In 2013 there is also a good possibility that EMC will lose its ≠1 position as Seagate could surpass $14 million and especially WD $15 billion in revenue. EMC was at $15.5 billion in 2012 but it's not sure that this amount will be superior in 2013.

In our previous report, all top companies saw their sales growing except HDD manufacturers because their revenue deesp drastically in the last quarter of calendar 2011 -  entirely due to the Thailand flood - as well as SanDisk and Dell by more than 10%.

The Top 12 all together increased sales by 10% in 2012, being a good year globally for the storage giants. It was 5% in 2011 and their annual revenues are all above $2 billion, except Dell.

Some comments for three Asian companies: Hitachi, Samsung and Toshiba:

• For Hitachi, we only rank here wholly-owned subsidiary HDS (including storage systems sold in Japan). But the Japanese group has two other storage activities: wholly-owned subsidiary Hitachi Maxell in storage media and the joint venture Hitachi-LG storage with LG in optical disc drives not included here.
• Samsung, no more in HDDs, could merit to be included in the Top 12 but the company does not precisely publish revenue in NAND flash chips and SSDs. The only figure we got: for 2011, the chip unit registered revenue of 36.99 trillion won ($33 billion).
• It also not easy to get numbers from Toshiba. We just learned that it recorded 1,298 billion yens in FY12 ended March 2012 in HDDs and flash products, the equivalent of around $12.8 billion.

Notes:

• Here storage is defined as the activity of recording and retrieving computer data using any form of digital devices (based on magnetic, tape, optical, non volatile solid-state - not RAM -, and subsystems) including all associated connectivity, software and services.
• For this ranking we used the companies' financial results for their fiscal year 2012 - not the calendar year - ending in any month of 2012. We got official figures, no estimations - but for IBM - for all of them for storage only.