The storage division of Korean conglomerate Samsung Corp is shipping its new 6-speed DVD-ROM drive, a rewritable CD drive and a 48-speed CD-ROM unit while readying plans to increase the share of sales from channels rather than OEM contracts. Samsung competes in the desktop storage market with magnetic and optical devices and its semiconductor and computer products business is expected to bring in revenue of $21bn this year, according to Trevor Duplock, European sales and marketing director for storage systems.
Separate figures are not available for storage per se. Duplock did say that, however, despite its Asian background and the fact that all manufacture is concentrated at its Koreran plant, the company derives 40% of its revenue in this area from the US and 40% from Europe, with only 20% coming from Asia. The strong US and European presence is due to the company’s OEM deals with major PC manufacturers in the States, which extend across to their operations in Europe too. According to IDC figures for 1998, these contracts were responsible for the company cornering 6% of the European market for hard drives and 8% in optical devices. Duplock reckons those shares now stand at 11% and 14% respectively.
OEM deals represented 80% of revenue in 1997/98, said Samsung’s European marketing director, but that figure is now shrinking back to around the 60% level as the company starts to beef up channel sales. So far we’ve concentrated on global OEM business and sales into systems integrators who tend to be niche players, but now we want to step up our relationships with the big general distributors, he said.
Samsung is currently evaluating distributors with a single logistic center for all of Europe to decide which ones to partner with. Among them are the big three US-based players Ingram Micro, Techdata and CHS, as well as European ones such as Raab Karcher and Actebis.
