IT Scan

May 21, 2004
India critical for Hitachi GST's success

BANGALORE -- Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) recently announced an agreement with Singapore based Cyberstar to support a nationwide extended warranty support program in India. Consumers, SIs and OEMs can now extend their warranties of Hitachi's Deskstar hard drives purchased from an authorized distributor in India after 1 May 2004. The India warranty program is available across all Deskstar family of products, which includes the 40GB, 80GB, 120GB and 160GB ATA models that come with standard 2MB cache and one-year warranty.

Pete Andreyev, vice president, Asia Pacific, Hitachi GST, said that India is critical for the firm's success and will be a strategic market. "India has the leading outsourcing industry, it is among the leading audio-visual industry, it has a sizeable HDD market size, and there are considerable consumer electronics opportunities," he said. "We want to play across all market segments -- OEMs, SIs, resellers and consumers. We will be focusing on both the branded and the unbranded channels as well." The firm enlisted Cyberstar as a strategic partner last November.

Hitachi GST was formed in January 2003, and all manufacturing was conducted in Asia. He said: "We are now second behind Seagate in HDDs. However, we are growing the fastest in HDD than anyone else. We now have the broadest product portfolio and have more patents than the others, such as Maxtor, Samsung, Toshiba, etc." He said that new applications are emerging in the HDD segment. "These are new applications that people have been talking about for a number of years, such as automotive, MP3 players, STBs, etc.," noted Andreyev. He added that the firm's HDD revenue is set to grow from US $22 billion in 2003 to US $26 billion in 2004.

Hitachi GST intends to plan for every market segment and play as broadly as possible. Andreyev said: "We are the number four in the largest market, desktop, with our 7200rpm product. India and China are a bit behind, but are finally starting to ramp up. We are very vertically integrated. Our next move would be to perpendicular integration, perhaps, by 2006."

Contact:
Hitachi GST
www.hitachigst.com