
With an initial investment of $23 million provided by Hambrecht & Quist, Citicorp Venture Capital Ltd., and several other financial partners, Read-Rite was established in November 1981, in Milpitas, California, to begin producing thin-film recording heads.īy November 1984, Read-Rite has shipped its first thin-film recording head. The group believed thin-film recording technology was the key. Well versed in the ways of the computer industry, this group responded to a perceived trend towards increasingly smaller hard drives and a corresponding need for technology that would allow data to be accessed quickly and efficiently. Read-Rite was founded by a group of computer scientists and venture capitalists in California ’s booming Silicon Valley. However, analysts predicted that more companies would enter the arena in the late 1990s.

Moreover, competition in the company ’s market was slight in 1994, there were fewer than five similar manufacturers in the world. Demand for Read-Rite ’s highly specialized product has been bolstered by the computer industry trend towards obtaining higher performance from increasingly smaller components. The company ’s client base consists of other manufacturers of computer components, including Western Digital, Maxtor Corp., Conner Peripherals, Inc., Digital Equipment Corp., NEC, Quantum, and Micropolis Corp. Read-Rite also manufactures the head stack assemblies that house these thin-film recording heads, holding a small but growing market share in that segment.


is the world ’s top supplier of thin-film recording heads, a component used in Winchester disk drives to read data stored on a computer ’s hard disk.
