New tech products featuring large data storage capabilities have become increasingly affordable in Asia, due to both huge consumer demand and a thriving hard disk drive (HDD) market.
New findings from GfK Asia, a retail and technology market data and intelligence provider, show that cost per gigabyte (GB) in the Asia* region has fallen 23-40 percent within the last two years**. Price declines steeper in mature economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, compared to emerging countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The firm says the growth in sales of higher capacity disk drives is an indication of consumers’ growing appetite for more space.
GfK Asia’s IT retail panel in Asia found that Asian consumers spent close to USD103 million on some 908,000 units of 1 terabyte (TB) HDDs in the past two years, translating to an average cost of USD113 per 1TB.
Reports also showed that the market in mature economies grew at a faster rate, registering a seven-fold (765 percent) increase in sales of 500GB storage disks in just two years, while sales of 750GB capacity ones grew 13 percent in the last year alone**.
“Since their entrance onto the market in the first half of 2007, 1TB hard disk drives are showing marked improvements in sales, which grew significantly by 30 percent within the last quarter (Apr – Jun10) despite their considerably high selling price which averages USD148,” said Gerard Tan, Regional Account Director for IT at GfK Asia. “A 1TB hard disk offers endless possibilities in digital content storage as it would mean having convenient access to more than 700 days of non-stop music, approximately 300,000 high resolution digital photos, or 250 DVD films", he added.
“Notebooks and netbooks nowadays are getting smaller, if not thinner; and emphasis is placed on greater performance. Given the relatively small dimension, the typical internal 2.5" HDD is hard-pressed for space allocation. Because of this, consumers often have a secondary external storage as a standby,” said Tan.
Consumers in maturing countries such as Taiwan are seen to prefer external high capacity HDDs, such as 3.5” 1TB and above storage capacity drives. This is the fastest growing segment of HDDs, which registered 567 percent growth in sales when comparing year-on-year findings.
In emerging economies, cost per gigabyte dropped by over a fifth (23%) in two years. This brought about a corresponding 65 percent hike in sales during this period of time.
Sales of 500GB storage drives grew almost 545 percent in two years, while that of 750GB in size increased by 48 percent. “With the latest developments in the constantly evolving PC market and Internet environment, such as introduction of the new iPad, higher broadband speeds, greater access to WIFI zones, coupled with existing compression modes—from imaging to audio-visual, and users requiring greater storage space for all types of digital content, demand for high capacity digital storage space is likely to continue being strong in the foreseeable future,” said Tan.