Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an Irish-domiciled data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States. Seagate developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD), the 5-megabyte ST-506, in 1980. They were a major supplier in the microcomputer market during the 1980s, especially after the introduction of the IBM XT in 1983. Much of its growth has come through its acquisition of competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data Corporation's Imprimis division, the makers of CDC's HDD products. Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006, and Samsung's HDD business in 2011. Today, Seagate, along with its competitor Western Digital, dominates the HDD market. Seagate Technology operates manufacturing and R&D operations in Thailand, with locations in Teparuk, Samut Prakan, and Korat, Nakhon Ratchasima. The facilities employ approximately 14,000 to 15,000 people, representing nearly half of the company's global workforce.
History
Founding as Shugart Technology Seagate Technology (then called Shugart Technology) was incorporated on November 1, 1978, and commenced operations with co-founders Al Shugart, Tom Mitchell, Doug Mahon, Finis Conner, and Syed Iftikar in October 1979. The company came into being when Conner approached Shugart with the idea of starting a new company to develop 5.25-inch HDDs which Conner predicted would be a coming economic boom in the disk drive market. To avoid a lawsuit from Xerox's subsidiary Shugart Associates (also founded by Shugart), the name was changed to Seagate Technology while retaining the letters S, G and T from Shugart.
Early history and Tom Mitchell era The company's first product, the ST-506, with a storage capacity of 5 megabytes (MB), was released in 1980. It was the first hard disk to fit the 5.25-inch form factor of the Shugart mini-floppy drive. It used a Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) encoding and in the following year released a 10 MB version, the ST-412. With this, Seagate secured a contract as a major OEM supplier for the IBM XT, IBM's first personal computer to contain a hard disk. The large volumes of units sold to IBM fueled Seagate's early growth. In its first year, Seagate shipped $10 million worth of units to consumers. By 1983, the company shipped over 200,000 units for revenues of $110 million. In 1983, Al Shugart was replaced as president by the chief operating officer, Tom Mitchell, in order to move forward with corporate restructuring in the face of a changing market. Shugart continued to oversee corporate planning. By this point, the company had a 45% market share of the single-user hard drive market, with IBM purchasing 60% of the total business Seagate was doing at the time. In 1989, Seagate acquired Imprimis Technology, the disk storage division of Control Data Corporation, resulting in a combined market share of 43%. Seagate benefited from Imprimis' head technology and reputation while Imprimis gained access to Seagate's lower component and manufacturing costs.
Second Al Shugart era (1990s) In September 1991, Tom Mitchell resigned as president under pressure from the board of directors, with Al Shugart reassuming presidency of the company. Shugart refocused the company on its more lucrative markets, and on mainframe drives instead of external drives. He also pulled away from outsourcing component production overseas. This allowed Seagate to better keep up with demand for PCs, which increased extremely rapidly in 1993 across the market. This included a domestic partnership with Corning Inc., which began using a new glass-ceramic compound to manufacture disk substrates. In 1991, Seagate also introduced the Barracuda HDD, the industry's first hard disk with a 7,200 RPM spindle speed. In May 1993, Seagate became the first company to cumulatively ship 50 million HDDs over its firm's history. The following year, Seagate Technology Inc moved from the Nasdaq stock exchange to the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the ticker symbol SEG. Upon leaving, the company was the 17th-largest company in terms of trading volume on the Nasdaq exchange. In 1996, Seagate merged with Conner Peripherals to form the world's largest independent hard-drive manufacturer. Following the merger, the company began a system of consolidating the components and production methods within its production chain of factories in order to streamline how products were built between plants. In May 1995, Seagate Technology acquired Frye Computer Systems, a software company based in Boston, Massachusetts. This company developed the LAN monitoring software kit The Frye Utilities for Networks, which won PC Magazine's "Editor's Choice" award in 1995. In 1996, Seagate introduced the industry's first hard disk with a 10,000 RPM spindle speed, the Cheetah 4LP. By 2000, this product increased to a speed of 15,000 RPM with the release of the Cheetah 15X. In May 1997, the High Court of Justice in England awarded Amstrad PLC $93 million in a lawsuit over reportedly faulty disk drives Seagate sold to Amstrad, a British manufacturer and marketer of personal computers. That year, Seagate also introduced the first Fibre Channel interface hard drive. In July 1997, Seagate Technology agreed to acquire San Jose, California-based startup Quinta Corporation for up to $325 million ($230 million in cash plus up to $95 million in performance milestones). Quinta developed Optically Assisted Winchester (OAW) laser technology purported to bypass traditional magnetic storage limits and thereby increase hard drive data density In 1997, Seagate experienced a downturn, along with the rest of the industry. In July 1998, Shugart resigned his positions with the company. Stephen J. "Steve" Luczo became the new chief executive officer, also joining the board of directors.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
