Data storage solutions provider Western Digital Corp has seen “good growth” for its retail offerings (targeting the B2C segment) that include flash drives, USBs, memory cards, SSDs, and external hard disks.

Increasing video content creation, a booming social media influencer community, growing event photography (professional photography) market and increased smart phone penetration have helped push up the demand for “high-capacity” storage devices.

Listed on Nasdaq, Western Digital Corp is known for storage devices through brands like WD, SanDisk and G-Technology. While WD is primarily for external hard disks / drives, SanDisk has solutions in the mobile storage, card and readers space. G-Technology is targeted at professionals and mostly caters to the B2B segment.

According to Khalid Wani, Director Sales, India Western Digital, the country continues to be “one of the important markets”. The R&D Centre in Bengaluru has been ramped up with “investments being done consistently”.

Typically, India is seen as a country where “having back-ups” is a relatively low priority; that is people prefer saving work / content on their existing devices. Increasing mobile phone penetration has to some extent created consciousness on having “separate memory cards”. Data recovery remains a costly proposition.

However, the pandemic-induced-lockdown and closure of offices, increased work-from-home, along with rising malfunctioning of electronic devices have only increased the consciousness of having back-ups, especially on external devices (hard disks or memory cards).

“The B2C segment has been growing for us over the last few years. Increasing mobile penetration also means an increase in requirement for back-up options like memory cards, flash drives or dual drives,” Wani told BusinessLine .

Wider portfolio

Western Digital has been on the look out for consumer trends and preferences. This saw it come up with a 1 TB SanDisk extreme micro-SD card, which was recently sold through an e-tailer; and the 1 TB SanDisk dual USB drive, which helps transfer data between smartphones and tablet PCs to another device.

“If you see the long-term benefits, a storage device is a much cheaper option than recovery of lost data,” he pointed out.

Nearly 40-45 per cent users think data storage is a cumbersome process and Western Digital with a wide portfolio of offerings intends to break this myth. “Our idea is to see that every time the user wants to transfer data to another device, we have an offering in that space, be it (though) a flash drive, an eternal storage device or a dual drive. And it is as easy to use as plugging in.”

The same logic is being followed as the company sees rising adoption of its storage solutions in the enterprise space. More adoption of Cloud technologies has pushed up the requirements there too.

comment COMMENT NOW