Brief

Indian external disk storage revenues at $30 million

For the external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market, India narrowly edged past Taiwan as the fourth largest storage market in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), both in unit shipments and spending terms in AMJ 2005. The Indian market totalled $30.01 million. HP continued to lead the storage market in India with a 22 percent share of revenues, EMC followed in second place with 19.6 percent and IBM with 18.3 percent share completed the top three. Telecom, banking and CSI were the three primary markets for storage in India and accounted for 32, 19 and 15 percent share of revenues respectively.

The external disk storage revenues in APEJ totalled $373 million in the second quarter of 2005 to register a more than 9 percent growth in revenues over JFM 2005, according to Gartner Inc. As a result, APEJ remained the fastest growing region for ECB storage in the world. Additionally, the share of APEJ as a percentage of worldwide shipments also witnessed a continual increase during the same time period.

In Q2 2005, China, Australia and Korea with 32, 18.4 and 14.6 percent respective share in revenues remained the leading storage markets within APEJ.

ECB storage revenue in Australia totalled $68.6 million in the second quarter of 2005. The amount of external disk storage capacity shipped in the same period was an impressive 5,034 terabytes. Likewise, storage figures in China totalled 10,949 terabytes at $119.2 million. Shipment figures in Korea and India totalled $54.4 and $30.0 million, respectively.

Despite losing market share for the second quarter in succession, HP managed a respectable lead over its competitors and maintained a firm hold on its market leadership position in the APEJ region. The market leader’s revenues grew 2 percent sequentially to total $82.9 million during AMJ 2005. Market share figures dropped from 23.8 percent in JFM 2005 to 22.3 percent in AMJ this year. “Strong performances in Australia, China and Korea were imperative for the vendor’s performance in the region,” said Aman Munglani, Principle Analyst for Storage, Gartner. “Market leadership positions in comparatively smaller markets that include India, Hong Kong and Taiwan further helped HP’s numbers”.

Maintaining market positions from the last quarter, EMC and IBM totalled 19.1 and 18.1 percent revenue share respectively. Interestingly, EMC which grew 10.2 percent over the last quarter was the fastest growing vendor among the top three players. “EMC seems to be considerably lagging behind leaders in markets such as China, Australia and Taiwan and an increase in revenues in these markets is critical to market performance,” adds Aman Munglani. IBM on the other hand leads the ECB market in China with more than 20 percent share of revenues and came second only to Hewlett-Packard in Hong Kong and Taiwan. “Among the bigger markets, IBM needs to concentrate on Korea and Australia to increase its overall positioning in the region,” adds Munglani.

Dell continued to make significant inroads into the Asia Pacific markets, closing the quarter on a high. Its revenues increased 53 percent on a sequential basis to total $34 million in AMJ 2005. Moreover, the vendor also achieved a near 2.5 percent increase in revenue share over the preceding quarter. The CX series continues to account for a major chunk of Dell’s shipments and totalled 77 percent of all Dell machines installed in the APEJ region last quarter.

Sun Microsystems maintained positions from last quarter but enjoyed the distinction of being the second fastest growing vendor in the APEJ region last quarter. The vendor’s revenues in AMJ 2005 grew 39 percent for an 8.6 percent share of APEJ revenues. Strong performances in Australia, India and China were imperative to the growth seen for this vendor. Moreover a large part of the growth could be apportioned to a significant surge in shipments in the low end of its successful StorEdge 3000 series.

Network Appliance posted another quarter of strong growth in the region. The vendor’s numbers totalled 17.92 million for 4.8 percent share of revenues in the APEJ region. Australia and India continued to be their two largest markets in the region and together accounted for almost 57 percent of Network Appliance revenues in the APEJ region.