Nine months after it announced it planned to give other disk drive manufacturers a crack at its magnetoresistive heads, IBM Corp has finally landed its first OEM customer in the shape of Samsung Electronics Co. It may have got off to a slow start, but IBM says that about a third of the $1,300m investment it announced it was making in its disk drive business at the turn of the year is to go to support the OEM side of its magnetoresistive head business. IBM also says it has now shipped more than 200m of the advanced heads in its own disk drives – more than all other magnetoresistive head head manufacturers combined. It expects to ship more than 1 million heads to Samsung this quarter and several million additional heads by the year-end.
