GEORGE TOWN: With economic prospects looking up once again, Penang Seagate Industries (M) Sdn Bhd has become one of the first companies to start a recruitment drive to fill vacancies across the board.

This is in anticipation of an increase in demand for its products following a better performance over the past two quarters and a continuation of that momentum in its third quarter ending March 31, 2010.

Oh Kean Cheong, vice-president of Seagate Penang Slider Operations, said its performance in its fiscal year ending June 30, 2010 was expected to exceed its projections given in October 2009.

“Looking at the past two quarters and forecast for 3QFY10, we are confident of exceeding the earlier given financial forecast,” Oh told a media conference here on Jan 21.

“There have been many positive indicators, with many companies dealing in consumer electronics and PC markets having said that the demand has been good this year and are expecting demand to increase.

“We are now experiencing demands for our products which were not there for the past few years. Our production levels now are back to normal like in the pre-economic crisis days.

“Hence, while we did not even renew the contract of those whose terms ended over the past few years. We are now in the midst of aggressive recruitment for all levels, from engineers and technicians to production workers.

For the quarter ended Dec 31, 2009, the parent company Seagate Technology reported a record of 49.9 million disk drive unit shipments, revenue of US$3.03 billion and net income of US$533 million. For the quarter a year earlier, it posted a net loss of US$2.82 billion on revenue of US$2.27 billion.

The strong financial performance in the December quarter was attributed to Seagate’s ongoing progress in driving operational efficiencies, high performance products, leadership position in high capacity, improved product mix and overall strength of demand for digital storage.

Oh said this January had been better than the first month last year for the storage and PC markets with the driver of growth mostly from the notebook sector for disk drives.

“There is also an increasing appetite from people to store even more digital content, whether in audio, video or even pictures. Seagate will continue to look at the market trend and if the demand is there, we will follow that trend,” Oh said after launching a product fair at the Seagate facility.

Oh said the Penang facility would continue to move up the value chain and assume more development works.

“I see Penang continuing with this important role in manufacturing process development,” Oh added.

Seagate has 5,000 employees in Malaysia with two plants, one in Penang and another in Johor.

The Penang plant, with 3,000 employees, produces disk drives while the Johor plant produces substrates.