Hard drive price war: The scramble for Maxtor’s leftovers

The basic story is, Seagate bought Maxtor earlier this year and predicted it would manage to hold onto just half of Maxtor’s market share.

The rest of the hard drive industry basically rushed to the buffet line to clean up. The result is heavy price cutting in the second half of 2006, as drive makers rush in to fix their plates. The biggest market share eaters so far? Samsung and Western Digital. Below are the numbers from iSuppli:

iSuppli Table: HDD Supplier Ranking in Q2 (By Pct Unit Shipments)

Q2 ’06 Rank	Company	Q1 ’06 Share	Q2 ’06 Share	Percentage Change
1	Seagate	29.00%	34.10%	5.10%
2	Western Digital	18.50%	19.50%	1.00%
3	Hitachi GST	14.40%	15.10%	0.70%
4	Samsung	8.60%	10.50%	1.90%
5	Toshiba	9.30%	8.50%	-0.80%
6	Fujitsu	6.80%	6.80%	0.00%
7	Maxtor	11.90%	3.80%	-8.10%
8	Excelstor	1.20%	1.50%	0.30%
9	Cornice	0.40%	0.30%	-0.10%
10	GS MagicStore	0.00%	0.00%
	Other	0.00%	0.00%

Source: iSuppli Corp. September 2006