Seagate's Technology Briefing

We recently attended the Seagate Press Briefing on the 20th of June 2006, exactly one year to the day of the last Seagate Press Briefing. This was a short press briefing to give the media insight about Seagate's new products, its directions, presence in the world market as well as company growth.

The Press Briefing was held at the Shangri-La Hotel, Kuala Lumpur in a rather small but comfy Pahang Room. The registration took place at around 10 am. We arrived early and were warmly greeted by Audrey Cheah and Ng Yen Yen, both from Seagate's Public Relations department.

The Press Briefing

The Press Briefing was handled by Kevin Lee, Seagate's Managing Director for APAC Channel Sales & Marketing. Although a rather recent addition to the Seagate team, Mr. Lee has 18 years of experience in the IT industry and has worked for Motorola, AT&T, Intel and Iomega. He also started two software companies in China.

Kevin Lee, Seagate Managing Director for APAC Channel Sales & Marketing

As soon as the other journalists arrived, Mr. Lee started his presentation, detailing Seagate's focus on the On-Demand World. In Seagate's view, the future lies in the proliferation of on-demand content, driven by services like iTunes, eMusic and CinemaNow. Even game consoles like XBox are driving up the demand for online downloads.

To address the storage requirement for the rapid proliferation of on-demand content, Seagate has created a large number of new products specifically targeted at key aspects of this market. He also touched a little on how Seagate's acquisition of Maxtor has allowed them to expand their leadership of the storage market.

In fact, Seagate now commands twice as much retail business as its nearest competitor. Seagate also ships 60% of all SCSI, FC and SAS drives in the market as well as 40% of all desktop ATA drives. In numerical terms, that comes up to about 40 million units per quarter, or about 160 million units per year.

With the new products debuting in the coming months, Seagate will have a total of 42 products in eight different storage markets. This gives them a 100% revenue access in all markets. This breaks down as such :

• Four handheld storage products
• Two gaming console storage products
• One automotive storage product
• Three DVR storage products
• Six notebook products
• Three desktop products
• Thirteen external storage products
• Ten enterprise-level storage products

With that, he went into the details of the new Seagate products. For your convenience, we will be showing them to you in separate pages, with their relevant specifications. Let's have a look!