Issue 11: 1 Sept 2014

Thailand’s hard disk drive industry has demonstrated a resilience that not even an act of God can dampen.

Dr Sampan Silapanad, pres-ident of Thailand’s Associa-tion of Electronic and Com-puter Employers Association

No matter what happened to the world’s economy, nothing can pull back Thailand from putting itself on the map and claim the title of the world’s flagship HDD producer.

In the past 30 years, Thailand has emerged as one of the main manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDD) that run the majority of the world’s laptop and desktop computers as well as the huge server farms that the major corporations use to store their data. These include huge multinational companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, who manage the rapidly increasing volumes of data stored in the ‘cloud’.

The word’s top two HDD makers, US-based Western Digital and Seagate have established their primary Asian HDD facilities in and around Bangkok.

“They initially went to Singapore but quickly moved to Thailand where wages were reasonably low and the workers had the best natural skills in the region,” says Dr Sampan Silapanad, president of Thailand’s Association of Electronic and Computer Employers Association, adding that the country makes about nearly 30% of the world’s HDDs.

In the past decade HDD technology, which uses an electro-mechanical system, has been challenged by the rapid rise of the more efficient – but considerable more expensive – solid state drives (SSD) which use just electronics and can retrieve information faster. The increasingly popular smartphones and tablets use SDD technology.

Despite this Dr. Silapanad claims that HDD volumes will continue to increase alongside those of SDDs.

Thailand has emerged as one of the main manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDD).

“When solid state came along people asked will the hard drive die? The PC market had dropped heavily for the past three years,” he says, while forecasting that 2014 would see the lowest water mark for international PC and laptop sales, which have been hurt in recent years by the soaring popularity of smartphones and tablet  computers.

But the slack in the PC market has been more than made up for by the soaring market for enterprise storage where HDD still reins supreme.

Gartner Group, the world’s leading consultancy on information technology agrees. Gartner HDD analyst John Monroe says that growth within the PC market will return but slowly. The main driver of HDD sales is the growth in enterprise data requirements by “a very conservative 35% per year for at least the next five years.”

“All the people that use mobile phones and tablets need somewhere to store their videos, pictures and information,” he says. “And that is why we will continue to see growth in the HDD market for storage capacity where it is still ten times cheaper than SDD.”

All this is great news for Thailand which is in a prime position to capitalise on its traditional strength in the sector and competitive wages. And to make the outlook even more rosy, HDD makers are now producing the first generation of HDD-SDD drives which offer a neat compromise of higher capacity in a smaller unit along with reduced costs. The future looks promising for the Kingdom’s HDD sector.

Words by Michael Sainsbury