Worldwide PEL Storage Market Continues to Shrink in 3Q15- IDC

Worldwide personal and entry-level storage (PELS) shipments declined -13.4% year over year to 16.7 million units in the third quarter of 2015 (3Q15), but were up 10.3% compared to the previous quarter, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC ) Worldwide Personal and Entry- Level Storage Tracker .

Shipment values declined along with unit shipments, down -19.8% from a year ago to $1.3 billion.

“The personal and entry-level storage market was stagnant in 2014 and started to show signs of decline in 2015,&uot; said Jingwen Li, senior research analyst, Storage Systems . “The adoption of cloud storage has been gaining traction in the consumer space with its easy data access and mobile device integration. One of the negative impacts of cloud storage deployment leads to shrinking demand within the PELS market”

Market Highlights
Personal storage remained the dominant component of the PELS market and accounted for over 98% of market shipments.

This quarter marked the fourth consecutive quarter of declining shipments for personal storage, which were down -13.5% year over year. Entry-level storage, which represents the PELS market segment with higher margins, started to show shipment declines as well, with shipments down -4.5% during the quarter.

For personal storage, the majority of shipments were products with 1TB and 2TB capacity points, which combined accounted for nearly 75% of units shipped. On the entry-level side, 4TB and 8-20TB devices accounted for the majority of shipments, as SMBs demand larger capacity to meet their storage needs.

Regarding interface, USB remained the most popular choice in the market.

Dual interface products continued to grow at a double-digit rate (51.8% year over year). Ethernet offerings experienced the largest decline in the recent four quarters (-17.6% year over year), which was primarily due to the decline in the entry-level space.