The Indian SSD market is growing exponentially and there are multiple factors that have fuelled the growth of this market. Demand for quality based SSDs has significantly grown in last couple of years across segments such as gaming, education, enterprise, entertainment and etc. It shows how this market is progressing further. Talking about the key factors that are playing pivotal role in the SSD market growth,
Khalid Wani, Senior Director - Sales, India, Western Digital said, “Gaming is one important factor, which has grown the internal SSD margins, the other being PC upgrades. The demand for high performing PC is increasing and consumers are ready to shed extra on important components like SSD.
There are many other factors like growing internet penetration, increasing awareness among consumers about supreme features of SSDs which are primary reasons for this growth.”
Growth Opportunities for Channel Partners
With the ever-increasing demand for SSDs across India, the channel partners see great opportunities to grow. Even though the competition is huge but the partners of WD are selling cutting-edge SSDs that are in big demand. WD has been focusing on helping its partners in scaling up their performance and in 2023, the brand continues to extend its support for them by bringing best-in-class products. In line with this, Khalid Wani, stated, “At Western Digital, we have an integrated channel marketing strategy designed basis three pillars: Education, Reward, and Engagement. To educate our channel partners, we run consistent and robust partner programs to armor them for the changing consumer needs, market dynamics, and educating them on Western Digital products and solutions. We value what the channel partners bring to our organisation and run significant channel reward initiatives to reward their performance. SanDisk League of Heroes and myWD™ Partner Program are some of our reward programs. We run different programs like TechTalk- an app-based training module for channel partners, and WhatsApp business platform to engage with channel partners to address newer opportunities emerging in the current environment. Thereby able to create demand for partners to revive and grow their business quickly. We are committed to introducing more such reward programs and initiatives in the future to empower our channel partners.”
Latest Trends in SSD Market
Western Digital continues to innovate and introduce products and solutions to make consumers’ lives convenient. They closely monitor market trends and the needs of consumers to create innovative solutions that empower them to share their world. He continued, “NVMe technology helps boost the read and write speeds of our storage devices, allowing us to do more at faster speeds and at an improved efficiency. Until recently, SSDs were based on SATA technology for data transfer which was primarily designed for HDDs. However, NVMe technology leverages the PCIe interface and delivers a significant performance boost to SSDs which in turn allows users to experience proliferated performance on their PCs. The transition from SATA to NVMe has been growing rapidly and you would see that more and more PCs are now coming with NVMe slots.”
“Western Digital has been a pioneer in integrating NVMe technology in both internal and portable SSD portfolio. The consumer experience and evolving demands have been well catered to with NVMe based solutions and we see this only growing from here on,” added by him.
Rising Adoption of SSDs in Gaming Sector
For the past few years India’s gaming industry has grown massively and is set to reach a US$5 billion market by 2025 and along with this the PC hardware market is also witnessing growth. “Several gamers have now started using PCs for gaming instead of their mobile phones. Further, PC gamers can also choose an enhanced version of data storage and transfer considering more graphic games are popular which require more storage for better gaming experience. Hence, SSDs have become a need for gamers to ensure a lag free loading,” Khalid said.
“Our WD_BLACK extended portfolio brings a premium experience to PC gamers. We recently introduced the WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe SSD which can provide gamers with a smooth, consistent gameplay experience and more “tuning” features via the included Game Mode 2.0 software. This powerful internal PCIe Gen4 SSD delivers breakneck read speeds of up to 7,300 MB/s. With extremely low latency and predictive loading, gamers can expect an incredible gaming experience with faster load times and richer visual experiences. Available in capacities ranging from 1TB to 4TB, the new PCIe Gen4 M.2 drive features an optional model with RGB lighting and a heatsink to help sustain peak performance when playing resource-intensive games,” concluded by him.
