Singapore – The current era of digital content explosion has been spurring growing demand for greater digital data storage space among content hungry consumers, and the thriving hard disk drive (HDD) market has resulted in increasing affordability. GfK Asia findings show that cost per gigabyte (GB) in the Asian region shredded between 23 to 40 percent within the last two years, with the price decline steeper in mature economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, compared to emerging countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The recent years have seen growth spurts in sales of higher capacity disk drives—a clear indication of consumers’ insatiable appetite for digital storage space. GfK Asia’s IT retail panel in Asia revealed that consumers in the region spent close to USD103 million on some 908,000 units of 1 terabyte (TB) HDDs in the last two years, translating to an average cost of USD113 per 1TB. Reports also showed that mature economies tend to grow at a faster rate, registering a seven fold (765%) increase in sales of 500GB storage disk in a matter of just two years, while sales of 750GB capacity ones grew 13 percent in the last year alone. Consumers in maturing countries such as Taiwan are seen to be snapping up external high capacity HDDs, and 3.5” 1TB and above storage capacity is the fastest growing segment which registered 567 percent growth in sales when comparing year-on-year findings. In emerging economies, cost per gigabyte have dropped by over a fifth (23%) in two years, and 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,” concluded Gerard Tan, Regional Account Director for IT at GfK Asia.
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