Riding growth wave

Can you share some business highlights of this year?

We have had a very interesting couple of years, especially around the pandemic. Covid-19 has driven substantial additional investments in IT infrastructure as companies needed to adapt to the changes and support their remote workforce. We have seen strong demand across all of our business segments in the last 18 months, and customers and partners want to work with the brands they trust. Though our business took a dip when lockdown kicked in, it rebounded quickly when restrictions were lifted, and higher today than before. 

You have three key market segments- cloud, client, and consumer. Is cloud the fastest growing market for you?

The cloud computing business is growing quickly, and all hyperscalers have seen demand for their services go through the roof in the last 18 months. As you know, we supply to all the major cloud players in the market, and this segment requires higher capacity and the latest and greatest in technology. We have 18 and 20 TB hard disk drives, which we launched recently, and higher capacity enterprise SSD solutions for this segment. I’d say we see strong demand for our consumer solutions as well. However, the biggest challenge that we face is the global shortage in semiconductors, predominantly around controllers for us; the demand is high, and we are limited in our capacity to meet this because of semiconductor supplies. So what we have done as a corporation is to focus on high-capacity products to drive the revenue numbers.

Is your 20TB hard drive based on OptiNAND technology?

Yes, and we are incorporating this technology into all our future HDD products, leveraging our expertise in both hard disk drive and Flash sides. In fact, OptiNAND technology enables us to get to higher capacity and better performance very cost-effectively. For example, our 20 TB product has a nine-platter, 18 heads design. Our main competitor’s 20TB product has a ten-platter, 20 heads design, which instantly gives us an advantage in cost, reliability, and performance. We believe that technology will evolve into 22 TB, 25 TB, and beyond.

Is 18TB pretty much the de facto standard in the data centre market?

I’d say it is probably between 14-18 TB now because some customers can’t make that switch instantly. All hyperscalers have already transitioned to 18 TB because they need higher capacity and will now move to 20 TB. However, the big transition that we will see in the next couple of years will be the move to SMR. Traditionally, the SMR technology has offered only a 10 percent advantage over CMR and PMR, but with our OptiNAND technology, that SMR bump will grow to 20 percent from a capacity perspective. We believe hyperscalers can’t afford not to transition to SMR.