Western Digital Corporation announced that its annual product shipments to Saudi Arabia surpassed 500,000 units in 2002. This statistic is significant as the Kingdom accounts for as much as 35 percent of the entire Middle East’s hard-disk drive market. This level of demand also demonstrates strong underlying growth potential, countering recent reports of a fall in demand for PC components.
Klaas de Vos, Western Digital’s vice president and general manager, EMEA, recently completed a tour of the Kingdom, where he met with local partners and discussed current market conditions.
“The overall picture is that there is ongoing growth in the Middle East region’s IT sector — Saudi Arabia in particular — and that demand for reliable PC components is still outstripping supply in some key areas,” said de Vos. “Western Digital estimates that as few as 40 percent of Saudi households own a computer, meaning that there is tremendous potential for PC sales growth to continue. And with Saudi Arabia’s largely youthful population, Internet penetration is expected to surge in the next few years, drawing even more attention to the country’s need for reliable data storage products.”
According to Gartner Research Group, 2006 will see 30 million hard-disk drives made for TV and digital video applications, 20 million hard-drives made for gaming applications, and 10 million drives designed for network attached storage (NAS) applications. Western Digital hard drives offer economic, reliable solutions for mass storage activities, such as Internet downloads, digital image storage, movie and music downloads, Internet gaming, and home video editing.
“We expect to see constant, dramatic growth in the Kingdom’s hard-disk drive market, as personal entertainment, enterprise application, and personal computing increase. We will continue to work closely with our qualified, highly-efficient channel, enabling Western Digital to meet the differing needs of Saudi Arabia’s IT users,” said Rauf Baig, Western Digital sales manager, Middle East, Africa, and South East Asia.
Arab News Compunet 13 May 2003