Every year, tens of thousands of people make the annual migration to Las Vegas in early January to attend CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the largest trade show in the US. Taxi lines are notoriously long and hotel rooms expensive, yet each year approximately 175,000 people attend to witness the latest and greatest in consumer electronics. Over 4,000 exhibitors display their wares over 2.9 million square feet of convention space.
I am one of those migratory people, and this year isno exception. Although I have been attending CES for many years, every year, I am amazed at the energy of this show – there is no other like it. Over the years, I have seen more products and fads fail than succeed – such is the tech world.
I spend most of my time meeting with customers or in the Toshiba HDD hospitality suite showcasing our latest and greatest. This year, we are spotlighting our MG08 16TB*, and discussing plans to deliver 18TB – the perfect balance of large storage and performance best suited for the cloud environment. As it was last year, there is great interest in our nearline HDD products given the success of our nearline HDD business in the last couple of years, and in CQ4 2019, Toshiba America (TAEC) shipped a new record of nearline HDDs for the quarter resulting in record petabyte shipment.
Outside our hospitality suite, a completely different world exists. At the show this year, some of the major themes are 5G, autonomous driving, intelligent IOT, and digital health. And what does all of this have in common? It requires storage, and lots of it! As I see it, that’s great news for Toshiba. All of these products and countless more rely on storage and/or cloud, both of which Toshiba is a key supplier.
I am only here for a couple days, but that is enough for me. By the time, I return home to San Jose, I am thoroughly exhausted and in need of rest; however, every year I come home rejuvenated at the potential possibilities of Toshiba’s business for all of the consumer electronics that were on display. I will be happy to go home, but excited to return next year to see all of the new and exciting consumer products, especially the ones that require storage.
* Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, such as Microsoft Operating System and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.