Worldwide personal and entry-level storage (PELS) shipments declined 13.4% on year to 16.7 million units in the third quarter of 2015, but were up 10.3% compared to the previous quarter, according to the IDC Worldwide Personal and Entry- Level Storage Tracker. Shipment values declined along with shipments, down 19.8% from a year ago to US$1.3 billion.
The PELS market was stagnant in 2014 and started to show signs of decline in 2015, said Jingwen Li , senior research analyst, Storage Systems. The adoption of cloud storage has been gaining traction in the consumer space with its easy data access and mobile device integration. One of the negative impacts of cloud storage deployment leads to shrinking demand within the PELS market.
Personal storage remained the dominant component of the PELS market and accounted for over 98% of market shipments. This quarter marked the fourth consecutive quarter of declining shipments for personal storage, which were down 13.5% on year. Entry-level storage, which represents the PELS market segment with higher margins, started to show shipment declines as well, with shipments down 4.5% during the quarter.
For personal storage, the majority of shipments were products with 1TB and 2TB capacity points, which combined accounted for nearly 75% of units shipped. On the entry-level side, 4TB and 8-20TB devices accounted for the majority of shipments, as SMBs demand larger capacity to meet their storage needs.
Regarding interface, USB remained the most popular choice in the market. Dual interface products continued to grow at a double-digit rate (51.8% on year). Ethernet offerings experienced the largest decline in the recent four quarters (17.6% on year), which was primarily due to the decline in the entry-level space.
| Worldwide PELS shipments, 3Q15 (k units) | |||||
| Vendor | 3Q15 shipments | 3Q15 market share | 3Q14 shipments | 3Q14 market share | Y/Y |
| Western Digital | 5,207 | 31.2% | 6,376 | 33.1% | (18.3%) |
| Seagate | 4,325 | 25.9% | 4,797 | 24.9% | (9.8%) |
| Toshiba | 3,030 | 18.2% | 3,448 | 17.9% | (12.1%) |
| Buffalo | 465 | 2.8% | 484 | 2.5% | (-4%) |
| Others | 3,653 | 21.9% | 4,154 | 21.6% | (12.1%) |
| Total | 16,680 | 100% | 19,260 | 100% | (13.4%) |
*Note: Western Digital does not include HGST
*Note: Seagate does not include LaCie and Samsung
Source: IDC, compiled by Digitimes, November 2015
Article translated by Joseph Tsai
