Stocks of Seagate Technology, Western Digital and Maxtor were down yesterday on 5.45%, 7.5% and 7.23% respectively due to aggressive 80-120GB IDE hard disk drives pricing by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, as reported by In Play.

IBM Storage that now works under Hitachi Global Storage Technologies brand has been offering low prices on hard disk drives for the last six months. So far it has not helped the company to gain the HDD market share and even lead to losses for the year 2002; meanwhile some of its rivals managed to stay profitable or, at least, return to profitability amid weak computer hardware market.

It seems that now low prices on HDDs from Hitachi have accomplished their mission and former-IBM’s storage business is now “ahorse”. For companies like Seagate Technology, Western Digital and Maxtor it means that they now need to lower the prices on HDDs what affects their revenues and profits. Considering a very broad technology portfolio Hitachi Global Storage Technologies inherited from IBM we can be sure that once the company boosts its market share it will have enough chances to return to profitability, while other companies will have to make a lot of efforts in order to compete with HGST. This seems to be the reason of the HDD-makers stock tumble yesterday.