Teh Ban Seng, vice president and managing director, Seagate Technology Asia-Pacific
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| Singapore has the benefit of a well-educated workforce, a central geographical location and a pro-business tax system. | ||
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Q: Are you prepared for the recession?
Seagate is acting prudently to ensure we stay strong throughout the economic downturn. We are focused on controlling costs, managing our inventory and investing in key technologies to ensure our product and technology leadership in the industry.
The challenge that the industry will face is the fierce competitive environment. With the global slowdown, the market landscape will certainly get more competitive. We believe we have the right fundamentals and strategy to be successful and to lead the market, but there is likely to be further consolidation to the industry, across the supply chain.
For Singapore, like the rest of Asia, it will find 2009 challenging as the global economy slows. However, Singapore has the benefit of a well-educated workforce, a central geographical location and a pro-business tax system, which helps make the local economy resilient to the worst aspects of the economic crisis.
What is a trend that you expect will go in your favor this year?
The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content globally is breathtaking and consumers now drive much of this growth. The home now outpaces business in terms of storage.
The positive thing is that despite global issues, we expect to see continued growth across the region, albeit at a slower rate than before. This is driven by the demand from the emerging markets like China, India, ASEAN and also the overall growth of the consumer market across the region.
In the long term, all the trends for digital storage indicate significant growth.
In terms of threats, much has been written about SSD (solid state drives) or flash memory being a significant technology threat. In reality, flash memory is really more a complementary solution to the storage space, addressing the lower capacity and mobile space such as MP3 players, mobile phones and other portable digital devices. It is complementary in that much of the content is usually backed up on a hard drive anyway, therefore further driving demand.
As for SSD, the penetration in the notebook space has been very slow, and in fact a lot of the notebook makers have continued to focus on the HDD as the storage solution of choice. SSD will have some value in the enterprise computing space and we’re beginning to see that taking off.
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