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EMEA External Disk Storage Systems Market Remained Flat in 2Q13, Says IDC

The external disk storage systems market value in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) remained almost flat in 2Q13, growing by 0.5% year on year to $1.77 billion, according to the latest EMEA Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker from International Data Corporation (IDC). The tracker also shows, however, that capacity jumped 28.3% to 1.7 exabytes. In euro terms, revenue reached ?1.36 billion, a decrease of 1.2%.
Western Europe
Western Europe declined 6.4% compared with the previous quarter and 0.9% over the same period last year, to $1.29 billion. In contrast, the units shipped increased to more than 44,000, as the product mix shifted toward entry level products. The falling ASP per gigabyte contributed to the stable 32.1% jump in terabytes shipped.
The top 3 markets in Western Europe (Germany, the U.K., and France) all registered a rather flat performance compared with the same period last year. In particular, the French market was challenged by highly cautious purchasing behavior from the public, financial, and telco sectors.
Overall, Italy and Denmark saw the highest quarterly growth, with the latter also registering the highest year-on-year jump in revenues. However, the economies of Portugal, Greece, and Spain continue to struggle amidst a lackluster performance in Western Europe overall.
CEMA
Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) recorded a moderate revival of external storage market shipments, increasing the region-s revenue to $483.93 million, equal to 4.2% annual growth. Capacity grew a modest 13.1% year on year in line with the rise of ASP per gigabyte in the entry level storage class.
Poland, Hungary, and Romania in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Turkey, South Africa, and other smaller markets in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) were the drivers behind CEMA-s year-on-year growth with strong double-digit results. In contrast, the largest CEMA country, Russia, demonstrated its weakest performance since 2009 due to flat economic activity, weaker energy exports, and pessimism in the ICT sector. Israel and most of the remaining countries in the region recorded year-on-year declines in their storage systems revenue.
Vendor Highlights
The vendor ranking in EMEA revealed EMC still towering over its competitors with double-digit growth in CEMA. HP, NetApp, IBM, and Dell occupied the other positions in the top 5 ranking. While HP and IBM both recorded a decline compared with the second quarter of 2012, NetApp managed to grow on the back of its success in both entry and high-end storage classes in Europe. Dell achieved its best performance in a year by competing successfully with its Compellent product line. The strongest performers in quarter-on-quarter growth in 2Q13 were Huawei, DDN, and Oracle, albeit from a smaller base. DDN and Oracle performed particularly well in the high-end segment, with Oracle gaining traction from its Exadata family of products.
The EMEA market for storage systems remains challenging, following suit with worldwide developments, where only emerging markets demonstrated stable growth. “In general, vendors- performance seemed to polarize toward the extremes, with either excellent or very disappointing results,” said Silvia Cosso, storage systems senior research analyst for Western Europe at IDC.
Market Highlights Open networked (NAS combined with non-mainframe SAN) disk storage systems revenue rose 1.0% over 2Q12. The SAN market contracted to $1.2 billion, falling 0.7% year on year, and the NAS market rose 6.5%. EMC was the top vendor in both markets, with 24.6% and 46.2% market share respectively. HP had the second largest SAN revenue, equal to 19.9% of the market, followed by IBM with 17.0%. As for the NAS market, NetApp was EMC-s major contender, holding 35.7% of all NAS-based storage shipments.
Midrange systems were the only product category that recorded year-on-year increases across all EMEA subregions for overall growth of 4.4% year on year. The reasons behind this were IBM and HP revamping their performance in this storage class following a year of investments in new products and technology integration and rebranding efforts combined with strong channel programs. HDS made a breakthrough with its Hitachi Unified Storage platform. On the other hand, cloud storage adoption materialized in the strong double-digit growth of cloud-agile storage systems. Finally, demand for integrated systems, featuring midrange systems as the storage component, also boosted this market.
“CEMA is particularly open to adoption of systems in the $50-$150K price range,” said Marina Kostova, storage systems analyst with IDC CEMA. “The demand is generated mostly by the underpenetrated SMB segment in CEE and large businesses in MEA turning to solutions offering scalability, simplified management, and reasonable price.”
Taxonomy Notes:
– IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements, including controllers, cables, and (in some instances) HBAs, associated with three or more disks. A system may be located outside of or within a server cabinet and the average cost of the disk storage systems does not include infrastructure storage hardware (i.e. switches) and non-bundled storage software.
– The information in this quantitative study is based on a branded view of the disk storage systems sale. Revenue associated with the products to the end user is attributed to the seller (brand) of the product, not the manufacturer. OEM sales are not included in this study.
IDC-s EMEA Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the Europe, Middle East, and Africa disk storage market on a quarterly basis. The tracker includes quarterly shipments and revenues (both customer and factory), terabytes, $/gigabyte, gigabyte/unit, and average selling value. Each criteria can be segmented by location, installation base, OS, vendor, family, model, and region.