Seagate Technology has confirmed a 10 per cent reduction of its workforce.

The company also replaced CEO William Watkins with Chairman Stephen Luczo, while COO David Wickersham announced his immediate resignation.

"We are fortunate to have a leader of Steve's vision and experience," said Lydia M. Marshall, lead independent director and chair of the nominating and corporate governance committee. "Steve's significant understanding of Seagate's business and technology, and the customer and employee relationships that he built over his 15 year career at Seagate make Steve the ideal person to lead our Company at this time."

The newly inaugurated CEO expressed confidence in Segate's ability to regain its product leadership position across "all markets" and paid homage to his controversial predecessor, noting that Watkins had "made many significant contributions to our Company through his dedication, knowledge and leadership."

Seagate is scheduled to report second fiscal quarter financial results on Wednesday, 21 January 2009. The company was recently forced to cut its revenue guidance for the current quarter to $2.3-$2.6 billion, down from $2.85 to $3.05 billion.

As IT Examiner previously reported, Isuppli had assessed that the global shipment of hard disk drives could possibly stagnate or even decline during the fourth quarter of 2008. However, the company also issued a more optimistic forecast projecting potential sales of 593.2 million units in 2008 -- which would represent an actual 14.93 per cent increase compared to 516.2 million units shipped in 2007.

Isuppli also noted that 2009 unit growth could be as high as 6.8 per cent or as low as 4.3 per cent.

"Isuppli has reduced and rebalanced its 2009 forecast for PC unit shipments and is reducing its outlook for sales of HDD-equipped consumer electronics products," said Krishna Chander, senior analyst of storage systems for Isuppli. "This is having a negative impact on HDD shipments, regardless of which scenario wins out. However, Isuppli for now is sticking with its optimistic outlook, given that the forecast fits in with recent predictions for the leading HDD makers: Seagate Technology LLC and Western Digital Corp (WDC)."

Seagate projected shipments of 156 million units in the fourth quarter, while WDC maintained a slightly higher estimate of 161.7 million.

Isuppli also expects that HDD demand from notebook PCs manufacturers will increase at a brisk, double-digit pace during the next few quarters. In addition, SSDs (solid state drives) remain poised to challenge the market dominance of traditional HDD in late 2009. X

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