Hard-disk drives (HDDs) in the consumer electronics market looks set for a stellar year in 2007, according to a new report by IDC.
Titled Asia-Pacific Hard Disk Drive 2006–2010 Forecast and Analysis, the research house forecasts that digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top boxes based on HDDs will continue to fuel the growth of this market.
According to IDC, the hard-disk drive market in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, is expected to grow 26 percent year-on-year and surpass 270 million units in 2007.
DVRs, which accounted for the lion's share of the consumer electronics HDD market last year, are poised for "tremendous growth" ahead, due to their declining prices and low adoption rate in homes outside of North America and Europe.
In addition, game consoles with built-in HDDs such as Sony's Playstation 3, will also bolster the consumer electronics market growth this year, IDC said.
Nur Hayati Ali, market analyst for personal systems research at IDC Asia-Pacific, told ZDNet Asia that the increasing affordability of DVRs, coupled with the low penetration rate in Asia-Pacific, presents a huge growth potential for DVRs in the region.
"Changes in Internet use and consumer habits have also been key to the growth in the hard-disk drive market," Nur Hayati said. "For example, the proliferation of portable music players and digital music has created the need for much larger music libraries among [consumers]."
"Regardless of whether the players are flash or hard-disk drive based, these music libraries have stoked the consumer's appetite for bigger HDD capacities in their PCs, as well as external storage drives in order to store, backup, and move these files," she said.
According to IDC, desktop PCs are expected to account for 40 percent of all hard-disk drives shipped to the Asia-Pacific region, while notebooks will account for 29 percent.
China and Hong Kong will continue to account for the bulk of HDDs shipped to the region this year, followed by Korea and Taiwan. Most of the drives will go to the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and ODMs (original design manufacturers) in China and Taiwan, which assemble and build most of the world's PCs and consumer electronics, said IDC.
Meanwhile, India's growing local PC manufacturing and distribution industry will gradually increase the country's role in the region's hard-disk drive market, IDC added.
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