Kingston Technology Europe, a subsidiary of US-based Kingston Technology, the world leader in memory products, expects robust growth in its revenues and unit sales in the Middle East in 2010.

Antoine Harb, business development manager for Kingston Technology in the Middle East said the region was the fastest growing for the memory maker and registered a 17 per cent growth in 2009 despite the economic crisis.

“Kingston Technology experienced an upward trend in both unit and revenues in 2009 and this is set to continue in 2010,” said Harb.

“The memory market saw some financial recovery last year, like many other industries and Kingston Technology was able to benefit from the general rise in DRAM and Flash pricing,” he added.

“We also expanded our product line when we entered the SSD market at the beginning of 2009 and within 12 months, have gained a strong foothold in this burgeoning area.”

Kingston Technology’s global revenues reached $4.1 billion in 2009, a $100 million increase over 2008.

Kingston Technology’s modest increase was attributed to a rise in average selling price, healthier demand from corporate end customers and consumers, and the company’s entry into the solid-state drive (SSD) market.

“The rise in revenue marks a change from the previous year when an oversupply in chips and a weakened global economy led to a downturn in the memory industry,” said Harb.

Since its foray into the SSD market at the beginning of 2009, Kingston Technology has been at the forefront in driving SSD adoption among enterprise and end-users alike.

Steve Hall, SSD product manager at Kingston Technology, said: “While SSDs have emerged out of a host of storage device options, on tenterhooks of becoming the next big storage device product, there continues to be much debate surrounding adoption of SSDs.”

“To encourage adoption, Kingston Technology is positioning SSDs as a performance enhancing driver rather than a storage option,” he added.

Through his presentation to demonstrate the real price to performance ratio that SSDs have over traditional hard disk drives (HDD), Hall emphasised that performance, durability, ruggedness and power savings were the chief benefits of SSDs.

“2010 is the year of the SSD, and the tipping point when organisations and consumers have to stop thinking of SSDs in terms of price per gigabyte, but instead focus on the performance gains that SSDs have to offer,” Hall continued.

“SSDs should be viewed as a performance upgrade solution and not a storage device,” he said. – TradeArabia News Service