A Supply and Demand Lesson for Technology
Competition from flash memory and increased shipment of PCs and consumer electronics are driving down prices and fueling demand for hard disk drives, according to a survey released by iSuppli yesterday.
Average pricing of notebook hard drives tumbled, falling to $53 in the third quarter of 2007, from $86 in the same period during the previous year. Desktop hard drive prices fell to $51 in the third quarter of 2007, compared to $52.75 the previous year, according to the survey.
Overall, about 134 million hard drives shipped in the third quarter of 2007, compared to 114 million the previous year, a 21 percent year on year increase, iSuppli found.
Prices also dropped from intense competition between six hard drive vendors: Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung, said Krishna Chander, senior analyst at iSuppli.
“Prices will always come if there is enough competition. If one vendor is bringing [the price] of a drive down, everybody wants to bring it down,” Chander said.
