John Rydning Quotations

(Mergers are) good for the industry. Just the fact that there are fewer companies in the industry should help stabilize pricing in the long term. In the near term, there could be some benefit to Western Digital. There probably will be some merger-related losses. Western Digital is in a good position to pick up share.

This will bring some opportunities to some of the other drive vendors. However, it may be a challenge for those players to pick up additional business because the industry is fully utilized in terms of capacity.

As the demand for portable digital music and video grows, mobile device manufacturers will need ample storage capacities. Small form factor drives such as Seagate's ST1.3 provide a cost effective, high capacity storage solution for these device manufacturers compared to other storage alternatives.

Consumers want their content portable, and the 79 percent increase in shipments of mobile disk drives into consumer devices in 2005 over 2004 is evidence of this dynamic. IDC attributes this growth to a combination of innovative disk drive designs and effective integration of HDD technology into consumer devices by companies like Toshiba.

They've been executing their strategy very well, and it's been evident in their profitability.