External Disk Storage Systems market remains flat

Western Europe
Western Europe declined 6.4% compared with the previous quarter and 0.9% over the same period last year, to $1.29 billion. In contrast, the units shipped increased to more than 44,000, as the product mix shifted toward entry level products. The falling ASP per gigabyte contributed to the stable 32.1% jump in terabytes shipped.

The top 3 markets in Western Europe (Germany, the U.K., and France) all registered a rather flat performance compared with the same period last year. In particular, the French market was challenged by highly cautious purchasing behavior from the public, financial, and telco sectors.
Overall, Italy and Denmark saw the highest quarterly growth, with the latter also registering the highest year-on-year jump in revenues. However, the economies of Portugal, Greece, and Spain continue to struggle amidst a lackluster performance in Western Europe overall.

CEMA
Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) recorded a moderate revival of external storage market shipments, increasing the region's revenue to $483.93 million, equal to 4.2% annual growth. Capacity grew a modest 13.1% year on year in line with the rise of ASP per gigabyte in the entry level storage class.

Poland, Hungary, and Romania in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Turkey, South Africa, and other smaller markets in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) were the drivers behind CEMA's year-on-year growth with strong double-digit results. In contrast, the largest CEMA country, Russia, demonstrated its weakest performance since 2009 due to flat economic activity, weaker energy exports, and pessimism in the ICT sector. Israel and most of the remaining countries in the region recorded year-on-year declines in their storage systems revenue.

Vendor Highlights
The vendor ranking in EMEA revealed EMC still towering over its competitors with double-digit growth in CEMA. HP, NetApp, IBM, and Dell occupied the other positions in the top 5 ranking. While HP and IBM both recorded a decline compared with the second quarter of 2012, NetApp managed to grow on the back of its success in both entry and high-end storage classes in Europe. Dell achieved its best performance in a year by competing successfully with its Compellent product line. The strongest performers in quarter-on-quarter growth in 2Q13 were Huawei, DDN, and Oracle, albeit from a smaller base. DDN and Oracle performed particularly well in the high-end segment, with Oracle gaining traction from its Exadata family of products.

The EMEA market for storage systems remains challenging, following suit with worldwide developments, where only emerging markets demonstrated stable growth. "In general, vendors' performance seemed to polarize toward the extremes, with either excellent or very disappointing results," said Silvia Cosso, storage systems senior research analyst for Western Europe at IDC.