Having delivered strong results for fiscal 2018, Seagate Technology expects its sales to remain on track to robust growth in fiscal 2019, propelled by high HDD demand from the enterprise sector and the rollouts of next-generation storage technologies and solutions, according to company global sales senior vice president BS Teh.

Driven by rising storage demand from large-scale datacenters and enterprises, Seagate saw its revenues grow 4% on year to US$11.2 billion with net profits of US$1.2 billion and a gross margin of 30.1% in fiscal 2018, which ended June 29.

The company's HDD exabyte (EB) shipments also rallied 29% on year in fiscal 2018. For the fiscal fourth quarter alone, EB shipments surged 49% on quarter.

While EB shipments have continued to grow, unit HDD shipments actually declined 5-6% in fiscal 2018 and are expected to fall at a similar rate in fiscal 2019 due to the rising adoption of SSDs at PC-end devices, Teh noted.

While committing to continue to deepen its operations in the HDD market, Seagate is also rolling out SSD solutions in response to rising demand for such products from the PC and enterprise segments, Teh said.

The executive believes that Seagate will benefit from its participation with Bain Capital to acquire Toshiba's semiconductor unit, as it will enable Seagate to secure steady supply of NAND flash memory via long-term contracts and that Seagate will be able to satisfy SSD demands from enterprises and consumer electronics products leveraging stable supply capacity at Toshiba.

Seeing the company's SSD revenues already advance 50% on year in the latest fiscal year, Teh continued that the completion of the deal with Toshiba will enable Seagate to deepen its development of SSD solutions for long-term growth.

Looking into fiscal 2019, Teh believes that enterprise demand for HDDs will remain strong judging from lower total ownership costs, lower power consumption and high storage capacity of HDDs and that large-scale datacenters will continue to proliferate.

For the advancement of HDD products, in addition to the recently released 14TB Exos X14 HDDs, the company's developments of HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MACH.2 Multi Actuator technologies for the next-generation HDD manufacturing have achieved significant breakthrough and have also received well response from enterprise clients.

The new technologies will be implemented in the near future in Seagate's Exos enterprise HDDs, said Teh, adding that volume production of HAMR-based HDDs is expected to kick off in 2020 with a starting capacity of 20TB.