Seagate Technology history

Seagate’s first client was IBM in 1980, just as the latter was about to introduce its personal computers, which would set the standard for the industry.

The company went public in September of 1981, with an initial stock offering of three million common shares.

By 1983, the company shipped over 200,000 units for revenues of $110 million.

Another cofounder was Finis Conner, who left Seagate in 1984 to form Conner Peripherals.

Annual sales for fiscal 1985 declined 38 percent to $215 million.

In 1987 computer manufacturers started demanding the smaller 3.5-inch drives earlier than anticipated.

The market’s growth was less than anticipated, however, and revenue for fiscal 1988 declined 50 percent from the previous year, while inventories of 5.25-inch disks piled up.

In addition, the $450 million acquisition nearly doubled Seagate’s sales, to $2.4 billion for fiscal 1990, larger than all its United States competitors—Conner Peripherals, Maxtor, Micropolis, and Quantum—combined. Thus, Seagate’s next move was to gain entry into the market for the high capacity drives used in mainframes, by purchasing Control Data’s disk-drive subsidiary, Imprimis, in June 1989.

In September 1991, Tom Mitchell resigned as president under pressure from the board of directors, with Al Shugart reassuming presidency of the company.

Seagate’s profits rebounded beyond expectations in early 1992 as sales of lower priced, high-end personal computers took off amid vendor price wars.

In May 1993, Seagate became the first company to cumulatively ship 50 million HDDs over its firm's history.

For fiscal 1994 ending June 30 Seagate reported record sales of $3.5 billion and record earnings of $225 million.

In May 1995, Seagate Technology acquired Frye Computer Systems, a software company based in Boston, Massachusetts. that developed the LAN monitoring software kit The Frye Utilities for Networks, which won PC Magazine's "Editor's Choice" award in 1995.

The division became Seagate Software, Inc., later in 1996 and was headquartered in Arcada's home of Lake Mary, Florida.

In the year ended June 30, 1997, Seagate reported sales of $8.9 billion.

For the six months ended January 2, 1998, the company reported a deficit of $423 million; in the third quarter ended April 3, it lost an additional $129 million.

In May 1999 the Network and Storage Management Group was sold to Veritas Software Corporation in exchange for 41.6 percent of Veritas’s outstanding common stock valued at $3.1 billion.

On November 22, 2000, Seagate management, Veritas Software and an investor group led by Silver Lake closed a complex deal taking Seagate private in what was at the time the largest buyout ever of a technology company.

The new organization will have approximately 40 engineers, scientists, and professionals, and it will grow to 100 staff members by the end of fiscal year 2001.

Luczo became the chairman of the board of directors of Seagate Technology on June 19, 2002.

In 2003, he accepted an invitation from the New York Stock Exchange to join its Listed Companies Advisory Committee.

When the company separated the roles of chairman and CEO in 2004, Luczo resigned as the Seagate CEO on July 3, 2004, but retained his position as chairman of the board of directors.

In 2005, Seagate acquired Mirra Inc, a company that specialized in manufacturing servers and Maxter.

In 2006, it acquired companies like EVault and MetaLINCS and renamed these to form a new brand, i365.

In 2007, Seagate created the hybrid drive concept.

In April 2008, Seagate was the first to ship 1 billion HDDs.

In January 2009, Luczo was asked by the Seagate Board to return as CEO of the company, replacing Bill Watkins.

In June 2010, Seagate released the world's first 3 TB hard drive.

In December 2011, Seagate acquired Samsung's HDD business.

In the fiscal year ended June 2012, Seagate had achieved record revenues, record gross margins, record profits and regained its position as the largest disc drive manufacturer, and its market value had increased to over $14 billion.

In 2013, Seagate was the first HDD company to begin shipment of shingled magnetic recording drives, announcing in September that they had already shipped over 1 million such drives.

In 2014, Seagate went on to acquire Xyratex.

In 2015, Seagate acquired Dot Hill Systems Corp.

In February 2016, Seagate was hit with class action lawsuit over the defective hard drives they sold.

In January 2017, Seagate announced the shutdown at Suzhou, China - one of its largest HDD assembly plants.

In 2019, Seagate invests 47 million euros in a research and development project at its Derry factory.

In September 2020, Seagate announced it had entered the object-storage business and introduced CORTX, an open-source object storage software, Lyve Rack, a reference architecture based on CORTX, and a corresponding developer community.

In November 2021, at the Open Compute Summit, Seagate demonstrated the industry's first native NVMe hard disk drive.