(By Balachander) Research firm IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS) said that hard disk drive (HDD) revenue will drop by around 12 percent in 2013 due to relentless onslaught from tablets, smartphones and solid state drives (SSD).
The information and analytics company estimates HDD revenue to fall to $32.7 billion this year from $37.1 billion in 2012. HDD revenue will be flat in 2014.
"The HDD industry will face myriad challenges in 2013," said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS.
Zhang said shipments for desktop PCs will slip in 2013, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favor smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs, the analyst added.
Likewise, Zhang said, HDD gross and operating margins will fall due to continued price erosion.
"However, HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for Ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing," the analyst said.
Zhang said a major growth area for HDDs will be the use of hard disk drives in the business sector spanning the enterprise space, cloud storage, big data and big-data analytics.