A research note from analyst Hans Mosesmann of Raymond James Equity Research regarding the volatile hard drive market crossed The Station’s desk today. Some bullet points of possible interest involving worldwide market leader Seagate Technology and its suppliers:
—LSI appears to be gaining ground in the Seagate shop, at the expense of another chip supplier. “We look for LSI to have over 60 percent of Seagate’s HDD business in 2010 (currently about 50 percent) given continued share loss by STMicroelectronics. LSI (and Marvell) should further benefit from consolidation in the HDD industry, as OEMs have fewer suppliers to choose from.”
–More detail on LSI: “As the industry transitions to external storage and SAS 2.0, we believe that LSI’s software stack advantage will enable it to maintain its leadership position, as no other chip company has LSI’s breadth and depth of software intellectual property (with Hewlett-Packard the possible exception, as it uses its own).”
–Finally: “The external storage opportunity for LSI is a greenfield one, which the company pegs at over $250 million in 2010/2011. In SAS 2.0 in servers, LSI pegs the market opportunity in the $350 million range and the custom silicon opportunity in storage area networks at $200 million.”
Agree? Disagree? More info? Go here for that.