Western Digital leads the way in growing UAE information storage market

Desktop-class hard drive shipments to the Middle East and Africa have been growing at a rate of 40 percent year over year, according to industry analyst firm IDC.

"The Middle East is now one of the fastest growing markets worldwide for digital storage and is an area of concentration for Western Digital," said Klaas de Vos, Western Digital vice president and general manager, EMEA.

"Western Digital is a market leader in the UAE because we have focused on serving our customers locally, flexibly and with the premium, quality product that this market demands. The year 2003 will be one of bigger opportunities, and we're looking forward to maintaining our lead in the digital storage market," added de Vos.

A growth opportunity for the hard drive market worldwide is penetration of EIDE, desktop-class hard drives into the enterprise market. Serial ATA is a new technology that combines enterprise-class features with the cost efficiency of EIDE. The result is a product that satisfies the demands of enterprise applications at a significantly reduced cost. Serial ATA is also expected by industry analysts to be the standard PC hard drive interface by 2005.

"Without a current enterprise business to protect and with our EIDE expertise, Western Digital is ideally suited to lead the migration of EIDE into the enterprise with Serial ATA," Klaas said. "We expect to be delivering Serial ATA enterprise hard drives to customers worldwide in the first half of 2003."