for the same period Hutchinson Technology Inc revnue deteriorated by -2.71 % year on year, sequentially revenue fell by -1.78 %.

• List of HTCH Customers

We believe that the principal factors of competition in the suspension assembly market include price, reliability of volume supply, time to market, product performance, quality, and customer service. Disk drive manufacturers seek low cost designs and as the disk drive industry has matured and consolidated, cost competitiveness, and thus suspension assembly pricing, has become an increasingly important factor to our customers. Our customers’ operating results also depend on being the first-to-market and first-to-volume with new products at a low cost. Our development efforts typically have enabled us to shorten development cycles and achieve reliable high-volume output per manufacturing unit quickly.

Our principal competitors are Nihon Hatsujo Kabusikigaisha (“NHK”), Magnecomp Precision Technology Public Company Limited (“MPT”), a subsidiary of TDK Corporation, and NAT Peripheral (H.K.) Co., Ltd., (a joint venture of NHK and TDK Corporation). The NAT Peripheral joint venture has provided our customer, SAE Magnetics, the capability to produce suspension assemblies since calendar 2005. We believe that consolidation in the disk drive industry, including the affiliation between our competitor MPT and our customer SAE Magnetics, has resulted in shifts in certain industry supply chain alignments that have negatively impacted our competitive position since 2008. Our principal competitors in producing suspension flexures are Nitto Denko Corporation and Dai Nippon Corporation. Although we cannot be sure that the number of competitors will not increase in the future or that users of suspension assemblies will not develop internal capabilities to manufacture suspension assemblies or suspension assembly components, we believe that the number of entities that have the technical capability and capacity for producing precision suspension assemblies or components in large volumes will remain small.


We continually monitor technological developments in and potential threats to the disk drive storage market and we believe disk drives will remain the primary data storage technology for the foreseeable future. However, other types of data storage technology, such as solid state storage or flash (semiconductor) memory, have become competitive with certain disk drive applications, and therefore negatively affect the demand for our products. As an example, emerging applications requiring digital storage, particularly consumer electronics products that require lower storage capacity, are using flash memory, which has and may continue to limit growth opportunities for disk drive-based data storage.