The global storage market, including HDD and enterprise SSD devices, is expected to grow from around US$36 billion in 2013 to US$38 billion in 2014 and further to US$42 billion in 2015 as demand from cloud computing and Internet of things (IoT) industries as well as demand for personal, mobile and PC storage products, continue to increase, according to an estimates by Western Digital.

Currently, demand from personal and PC storage applications together still account for almost half of overall consumption, but Western Digital believes storage demand from enterprises will pick up rapidly in the near future and become the main consumer of the storage capacity.

In 2013, the market's overall storage demand was around 4.4ZB (4.4 billion TB) and the amount is expected to grow to 44ZB by 2020, a CAGR of around 40%, the company noted.

Although global PC shipments in 2014 are expected to drop 6% from 315 million units in 2013 to 296 million units, PCs are still the application with the highest storage consumption currently, the company said citing figures from research firms.

Personal storage devices also account for a heavy share in storage consumption and together with enterprise storage applications, the three product lines are the top-3 consumers of global storage capacity.

Western Digital expects enterprise demand for storage to surpass that of PCs in 2015 or 2016 and by 2020, demand from enterprise applications will account for almost half of total storage consumption.

Western Digital has planned a complete series of product lines to satisfy different demand. The company expects the storage industry's new opportunity to lie in cloud computing, IoT, NAS and personal cloud applications as well as newly developed applications for PCs.

To strengthen its capability, Western Digital acquired I/O software designer VeloBit in July 2013, Stec in September 2013 and Virident System in October 2013 to help improve its server flash drive technologies.

In fiscal 2014, Western Digital achieved gross margins of 29.9% and revenues of US$15.13 billion. About 65% of the company's hard drive shipments were supplied to OEMs, 24% were supplied to the distribution channel and 13% to regular channel retailers.

In terms of shipment regions, 54% of Western Digital's supply goes to the Asia Pacific region, 25% to the US and 21% to Europe.