Seagate Technology 2004

This case provides a background of the disk drive industry and discusses the experience of Seagate Technologies. On July 21, 1998, Steve Luczo became CEO of Seagate Technologies. By 2003, Luczo had managed to turn around Seagate from negative net income and declining market share back to a profitable company with an industry leading market share of approximately 30 percent. Instead of Seagate’s historical emphasis of cost-component minimization, Luczo instead focused the company on time-to-market (TTM) for all products. The case details Luczo’s approach to fixing what he viewed as being broken at Seagate: not enough leverage across designs, no processes involved in designs, inefficient factories, too many factories because there was no leverage, and inefficient use of capital.