**Disclaimer: This is purely for sharing information and educational purposes only.

This post is not intended in instructing/informing any personal to do buy / sell.

Please trade at your own risk or ask for advice from a qualified person.**

Part 1 [Link]

For Part 2, we begin with looking into the sales of Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba who are the main 3 biggest players in the storage industry. However we shall skip Toshiba currently in view of the turmoil faced by the company.

The difference between WD and Seagate is that 91% of Seagate’s revenue comes from HDD, while WD is a major player in the flash memory market as well. Since we’re studying HDDs, we’ll focus more on Seagate instead of WD.

Seagate's financial keynotes

• Set multiple new quarterly records including mass capacity revenue and total HDD exabyte shipments
• Solid shipment growth of 16TB and 18 TB
• Volume ramp of industry leading Mach 2 dual actuator drives with a leading hyperscale customer.

Nearline

In the nearline market, the company shipped 95.5 exabytes of HDD, up 25% YoY and 34% QoQ.

Average mass capacity per nearline drive increases driven by robust demand for 16TB and higher capacity products.

This contributes approximately 50% to March’s exabyte shipment.

Crypto, but HDD instead of GPU

As discuss in the Part 1 post, Chia Mining had increase the demand on HDD.

Bet you don’t know what Chia mining is! It’s pretty new. Introduced as a new ‘eco-friendly’ cryptocurrency.

Originally, most cryptos rely on a proof of work model to verify transactions. Miners have to solve complex problems - relying on computational power to earn coins -> which is energy intensive.

Elon Musk later said he doesn’t accept digital coins for purchase due to environmental concerns. HDDs have seen growing demand since CHIA uses spare storage space on hard drives to verify blockchain transactions instead of the energy intensive proof of works employed by the likes of bitcoins.

WD CEO said in April that it was seeing a pickup in demand for high capacity drives from Chia producers or farmers. This incremental demand has created a shortfall in availability of high capacity drives. The CHIA network uses over 8 EB, >2000% increase from April.

No one knows how long the craze will last though, sustainability is the risk. 

Hard drive pricing in China in April 24.

This only happens in some parts of Asia region. There's still stocks left in Shopee. But we're not a miner so not just scratching the surface here.

This is more of a educational industry coverage instead of a company's deep dive.

Hope you enjoy the read!

The chart are shared at Part 1.

Come follow us at our Telegram free channel: https://t.me/shibacapital

Facebook: Shiba Capital